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Why I don't discuss politics with friends
March 2025
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Why Does Claude Speak Byzantine Music Notation?
A Caesar cipher is a reasonable transformation for a transformer to learn in its weights, given that a specific cipher offset occurs often enough in its training data. There will be some hidden representation of the input tokens' spelling, and this representation could be used to shift letters onto other letters in…
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Everything is Ghibli
When we got “create anything” and all made the same thing
1235
The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
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The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
1237
How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -U.S. Constitution, First Amendment.
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Raising Kids to Have an Analog Childhood in a Digital World
Kids were not meant to be brought up in the digital world that exists today as it is incompatible with human neurological development.
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The average college student today
How things have changed
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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
Until a few years ago, any app you installed on an Android device could see all other apps on your phone without your permission.
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The Candid Naivety of Geeks
The candid naivety of geeks par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines
The challenge The authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely w…
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Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores
The US has become a hostile and authoritarian state to foreign scientists and is choosing ideology over science.
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Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds
There's a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction.
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The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss
What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News. What bothers me is that it’s unexplained.
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Conquest of the Incas
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
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What's Happening to Students?
Here's the latest news from the zombie wars
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Cottagecore Programmers
Every programmer I know has at some point longingly expressed how “[they] want to work with [their] hands”. Some say they wish they were a carpenter, some want to be in the fields on a farm, some want to raise chickens, or milk cows. It is however inevitable that I either hear someone say it or agree with it at some…
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I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud
This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed…
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63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide (2024)
Not one cuisine, not eight, but many more. Our best shot at a comprehensive-ish guide.
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The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
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The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
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All clothing is handmade (2022)
Writing about an art quilt I made with reused textiles and what I hope it reminds us about the clothing that we wear and the people who created it.
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The Road Not Taken Is Guaranteed Minimum Income
The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.
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Congestion Pricing Is a Policy Miracle
Which is exactly why Trump wants to get rid of it
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The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”
There's a corner of the Internet where people have been reclaiming their digital independence by hosting their own websites and promoting the idea of owning your own content. It's called the IndieWeb. The community has its own website , IRC channels, social media presence, etc. as well
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The F-35 as a Subscription Service
by Benjamin Cook (into by Tom Cooper)
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The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-Changing Sci-Fi Larp
A conversation with lead producer Laura Kröger on the making of Odysseus and what it would take to become a permanent institution.
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How popular is Donald Trump?
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
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The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)
The Internet Slum