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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,107 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1322
Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?
What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?
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Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? (2016)
Algebra is no longer being taught to San Francisco eighth graders. Is the tech capital of the world dumbing down its STEM education?
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The online sports gambling experiment
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
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On “White Fragility”
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
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Stay Gold, America
We are at an unprecedented point in American history.
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The Shirky Principle (2010)
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
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Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide
Compare live air quality rankings for major cities worldwide. See real-time AQI levels and pollution conditions by location.
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Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions
A new study by Cornell psychologists suggests that science and engineering faculty preferred women two-to-one over identically qualified male candidates for assistant professor positions.
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Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
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How Copyright Industries Con Congress
I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy, and so I haven’t bothered writing much about the absurd numbers the bill’s supporters routinely bandy about in hopes of persuading lawmakers that…
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58% of US adults have heard of ChatGPT; 14% have tried it
Just 14% of all U.S. adults say they have used ChatGPT for entertainment, to learn something new, or for their work.
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Human body temperature has decreased in United States, study finds
Stanford researchers have determined that average human body temperature in the United States has decreased since the 1800s.
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The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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Where did all the “reject” buttons come from?
More and more websites have added an option to say “no” to cookies and other tracking- as foreseen by the GDPR. Where did this trend come from?
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Humanness in the Age of AI
A path to an open and permissionless identity protocol.
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Stanford researcher: Google Circumvents iOS Privacy protection in AdSense ads
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple's default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking. This tracking, discovered by Stanford...
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Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming
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The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
Paul Graham's Hacker News is a great website to find interesting programming links and sane discussion. The site reflects a sort of post- Reddit sensibility; the design of HN was directly intended to address the shortcomings of programming.reddit.com from someone very much on the inside (Reddit was a Paul Graham Y…
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.name Termination
Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. It predates YouTube, Facebook, and smart phones. Minutes after my daughter was born, I also registered beverly.fraser.name .
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LLM Inevitabilism
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing…
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