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Death by AI
One man's struggle with his mortality.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,213 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
782
Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”
783
Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…
784
Call of Duty gaming community points to ‘swatting’ in Wichita police shooting
A 28-year-old Kansas man was shot and killed by police officers on the evening of Dec. 28 after someone fraudulently reported a hostage situation ongoing at his home. The false report was the latest in a dangerous hoax known as “ swatting ,” wherein the perpetrator falsely reports a dangerous situation at an address…
785
Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
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An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
788
The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation
Should AI systems treat different demographic groups unequally?
789
Does Georgism work? Five years later
A guest post by Lars Doucet
790
Why Arabic is Terrific
I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute…
791
The media's lab leak fiasco
A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes
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Fighting Cancer
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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A Teenager’s View on Social Media
Written by an actual teen
796
The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss
What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News. What bothers me is that it’s unexplained.
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Rediscovering the Small Web
Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is…
799
Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
Same people, 13 years later.
800
Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences
Recently, OpenAI came out with a new language model that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2. It’s disturbingly good. You can see some examples (cherry-picked, by their own admissio…
801
What I Heard from Trump Supporters
After the election, I decided to talk to 100 Trump voters from around the country. I went to the middle of the country, the middle of the state, and talked to many online. This was a...
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Ten predictions (2004)
Ten Predictions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Update, September 2015: I saw the HN thread about Dan Luu's review of this post, and felt people were a little too generous with the scoring. So I'll offer my own scores and justifications here. 1) XML databases will surpass relational databases in
805
Early-Retirement Update
I’ve had a difficult time finding a way to create a new entry on a blog that has essentially been dead since 2015. Yet, I have had a persistent feeling that I owe my readers an update.
806
Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
807
Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls
808
Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
809
DOGE as a National Cyberattack
In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national…
810
Fukushima
When I visited Chernobyl 7 years ago, I didn’t think that a similar disaster could take place anywhere ever again, and certainly not in Japan.