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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. 2,107 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. — Paul Graham, What You Can’t Sa…
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Emails suggest reviews from the Wirecutter are “pay to play” (2014)
Does the Wirecutter offers unbiased real reviews? Not even close. This story is about a little company taking on a fake review site owned by the NY Times.
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Reasons not to buy from Amazon
If you want to order a book (or something else), don't buy it from Amazon. Amazon harms its customers, as well as workers, the national treasury, and many others that it affects.
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A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents
The share of 18- to 29-year-olds living with their parents has become a majority since U.S. coronavirus cases began spreading early this year.
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Errata: Steve Gibson
a summary of Steven Gibson events and quotes demonstrating charlatan status
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Israel's apartheid against Palestinians
Palestinians are systematically subjected to home demolitions and forced evictions, and live in constant fear of losing their homes. For more than 73 years, Israel has been forcibly displacing entire Palestinian communities. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians’ homes have been demolished, causing terrible trauma &…
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What Colour are your bits? - Ansuz
As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between id...
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Ethereum Energy Consumption Index
The Ethereum Energy Consumption Index provides the latest estimate of the total energy consumption of the Ethereum network.
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Ad Blocker Usage and Demographic Statistics in 2026
Interesting ad blockers user stats. Includes data on usage, demographics and more.
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State "keep right" laws
All states allow drivers to use the left lane (when there is more than one in the same direction) to pass. Most states restrict use of the left lane by slow-moving traffic that is not passing. The table below describes the law in effect in each state.
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Keith Smith on Free Market Health Care
Entrepreneur and Anesthesiologist Keith Smith of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma talks with host Russ Roberts about what it’s like to run a surgery center that posts prices on the internet and that does not take insurance. Along the way, he discusses the distortions in the market for health care and how a real market…
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Emails With Intercept Editors Showing Censorship of My Joe Biden Article
Given The Intercept's vehement denials, readers are entitled to see for themselves what the truth is: transparency journalism with integrity requires.
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Reconciling Mozilla's Mission and W3C EME
May 19 Update: We've added an FAQ below the text of the original post to address some of the questions and comments Mozilla has received regarding EME. With most competing ...
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Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border: Protecting the Data On Your Devices
by Sophia Cope, Amul Kalia, Seth Schoen, and Adam SchwartzDownload the report as a PDF.EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe U.S. government reported a five-fold increase in the number of electronic media searches at the border in a single year, from 4,764 in 2015 to 23,877 in 2016.[fn] Gillian Flaccus, Electronic...
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Spider Robinson: Melancholy Elephants
Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free…or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago—a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational—two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!—in the following story. It won the…
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I Am Deleting the Blog
[EDIT 2/13/21: This post is originally from June 2020, but there’s been renewed interest in it because the NYT article involved just came out. This post says the NYT was going to write a posi…
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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
Inside a decade of struggle to bring a scandal to light
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The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
Originally Published: May 2021 Inflation is a controversial and complex topic. This article looks at 150 years of data across multiple countries to provide a general idea of what inflation is, what to look for, and how to invest with inflationary and deflationary risks in mind. Read from the beginning, or jump to the…
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Kind of Screwed
TL;DR version: Last year, I was threatened with a lawsuit over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop. Despite my firm belief that I was legally in the right, I settled out of court to cut my losses. This ordeal was very nerve-wracking for me and my family, and I’ve had trouble writing […]
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Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
Fill this in yourself.
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Dude, you broke the future
Back to: PSA: Please don't nominate the Laundry Files for a Best Series Hugo Award (this year) | Forward to: New Book Week!
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Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
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Engineering Pornography (2002)
This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…
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The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium…
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