1081
Where is my von Braun wheel?
In 1962. There — that answers the clickbaity title right away.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1082
The Moat of Low Status
It hurts, but less than you think
1083
The wanton destruction of a creative-tech era
Fastly, you killed glitch.com and ruined your karma for 10,000 years. You have “betrayed yourself for nothing.”
1084
The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
Trust me, I counted.
1085
More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad
Sending this ad is completely destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, *to get users to believe that it’s private*.
1086
The Unsustainability of Moore's Law
Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles.
1087
Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
1088
Engineered Addictions
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention - and relationships
1089
I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric
This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a perfect time to reflect on the impact that it has had on my friend group still to this day. Update (2/7/2025): I'm genuinely blown away by the response to this post. This hit the
1090
AI Is Dehumanization Technology
A call to reject the deployment and use of AI systems in Canada's public sector.
1091
1092
The Hollow Men of Hims
An admittedly partial - but deeply troubling - case against America's most brazen medical grift, involving Chinese knockoffs, subscription traps, and prescription gas station sex pills.
1093
Community Is Motivation on Tap
A good community can have tremendous influence on one’s motivation. I never appreciated this fact enough so I wanted to write about it here.
1094
The cultural decline of literary fiction
What happened?
1095
Requiem for a Solar Plant
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
1096
The JAWS shark is public domain
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
1097
Rolling the ladder up behind us
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
1098
Open source can't coordinate?
I was taking a shower this morning, and was pondering yesterday's problem, where I suspect that I have an outdated version of hotspot Linux profiler, but I can't just go and download a fresh release from GitHub, because hotspot is a KDE app, and I use NixOS. And NixOS isn't a problem --- it's a solution.
1099
How OpenElections uses LLMs
In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections , the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or…
1100
Guess I'm a rationalist now
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl…
1101
I feel open source has turned into two worlds
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
1102
It's true, “we” don't care about accessibility on Linux
What do concern trolls and privileged people without visible or invisible disabilities who share or make content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to projects have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’…
1103
PWM flicker: Invisible light that's harming our health?
I recently spent a few weeks running a conference for a community of researchers and writers in a historic chateau in the French…
1104
Is there a half-life for the success rates of AI agents?
Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take
1105
What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding
There has been rather a lot of doomsaying (and perhaps astroturfing) lately about LLMs as the end of computer programming. Much of the discussion has been lacking nuance, so I’d like to add mine. I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be…
1106
Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it…
1107
Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API
Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful…
1108
When random people give money to random other people (2017)
A post on Decision Science about a problem of Uri Wilensky’s has been making the rounds: Imagine a room full of 100 people with 100 dollars each. With every tick of the clock, every person wi…
1109
NASA Is Worth Saving
Casey Handmer June 2025 Download a printable PDF. NASA was founded in 1958 in response to Sputnik and the emerging necessity of a robust, government supported space exploration and technology devel…
1110
The international standard for identifying postal items
The Universal Postal Union's S10 standard, in all its glory