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Ashley's Apple Story
Ashley's Apple Saga
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
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ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the c…
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California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
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How To Legally Own Another Person
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
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US Rail Construction Costs
Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my sta…
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Know Your Amphetamines
In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol...
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Community and Diversity
[I hope that it’s obvious from what follows that this is a statement of personal opinion, not an official Mozilla document.]
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Right Is The New Left
[Content warning: some ideas that might make you feel anxious about your political beliefs. Epistemic status: very speculative and not necessarily endorsed. This post is less something I will defen…
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An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Summary: 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…
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The age of average
In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a colla
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Please don't mention AI again
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.
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I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.
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Too Clever by Half
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…
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Please, enough with the dead butterflies (2017)
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
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Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal b…
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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
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No Brainer
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
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A Tale of Unwanted Disruption: My Week Without Amazon
On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly…
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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
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How to Kill a Decentralised Network
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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George W. Bush is smarter than you
The new George W. Bush Presidential Center is being dedicated this week. This seems like a good time to bust a longstanding myth about our former President, my former boss. I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events…
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The Wisdom And/or Madness of Crowds
an interactive guide to human networks