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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. 77 posts.
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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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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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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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Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning…
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Fast
San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 , yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost…
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I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
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Too Much Dark Money in Almonds
Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics? But Ansolabehe…
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Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
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Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy
[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years …
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RIP Culture War Thread
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can’t comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several yea…
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The Church of Interruption
A conversation with a Wizard
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Status as a Service
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
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Reasons Not to Use Apple (2018)
Apple reportedly had objections to what Jon Stewart said in his video program — it canceled the show after he had criticized China, and something the article describes as "AI". (It could be that what he criticized was actually large language models, which may be an important issue but are not "intelligence" .)
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Geek Social Fallacies (2003)
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interp
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What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
Available today
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The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
On Medium, Nassim explains how once an intransigent minority reaches a tiny percentage of the total population, the majority of the population will
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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about
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Why American Construction Costs Are So High
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
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Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist
I was first introduced to Austrian economics during my senior year in high school, when I first read and enjoyed the writings of Mises and Rothbard. The summer before I began my undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, I was able to attend the 1989 Mises Institute summer seminar at Stanford, where I met Murray Rothbard and…
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On Recent Controversial Events
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
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On Covering Webcams
The problem isn’t your camera, it’s malware. Don’t install any software from unknown or sketchy sources, keep your OS up to date, and you should be fine. And if you do have malware on your Mac, the webcam is likely the least of your problems.