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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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The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I've watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I've watched the show…
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Meditations on Moloch (2014)
I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and u…
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Lena
A note from the author You can now buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. This collection also includes a sequel story, titled "Driver". This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Mi...
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The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman
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I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to…
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So you want to abolish time zones
Laudable! Let's take a look at some of the changes that arise from this, through a simple case study: making an international phone call to a relative. Before abolishing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently...
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Xerox scanners and photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents Please see the “condensed time line” section (the next one) for a time line of how the Xerox saga unfolded. It for example depicts that I did not push the thing to the public right away, but gave Xerox a lot of time before I did so. <iframe…
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Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other
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Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution (2015)
How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.
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TikTok's Enshittification
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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I Hate the News (2006)
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
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Japanese zoning
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
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"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".
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What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…
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Considerations on Cost Disease
I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some ar…
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Gell-Mann Amnesia
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so…
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Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countr…
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Results of XKCD Color Survey
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter int…
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Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
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The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
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Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences
I. An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an e…
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The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?