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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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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 Productivity–Pay Gap
The huge gap between rising incomes at the top and stagnating pay for the rest of us shows that workers are no longer benefiting from their rising productivity. Before 1979, worker pay and productivity grew in tandem. But since 1979, productivity has grown eight times faster than typical worker pay (hourly…
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What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
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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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Why federated protocols don't work (2016)
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
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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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For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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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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Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again.
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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…