1261
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1262
"Wait, not like that": Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
1263
The good times in tech are over
For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of…
1264
How many artists' careers did the Beatles kill?
The sinister side of rock 'n' roll
1265
The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment
Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.
1266
Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
1267
Hidden Messages in Emojis and Hacking the US Treasury
On December 30th, while most of us were preparing for a New Year’s Eve celebration, the US Treasury was prepping a notice to lawmakers to notify them that their systems, which (obviously) contain highly sensitive, confidential data, had been compromised.
1268
The Church FAQ
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks…
1269
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
Who decided these personalized Siri features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and…
1270
My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
Romance fraud has been growing as an issue for years. It's not uncommon to see news stories with bewildered victims explaining just how deeply they'd been sucked in. After receiving a number of opener
1271
A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024)
These are the two most-streamed children's shows. Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.
1272
People are just as bad as my LLMs
Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (yes yes, seems silly I know, you can read part 1 and part 2 but […]
1273
Real Chilling Effects
A extraordinary pattern of government censorship and threats to speech
1274
An investigation into egg prices
'More hens, less income!' So said the United Egg Producers' economist Donald Bell in 1994. The industry has gotten more consolidated ever since. And avian flu is just the latest excuse to hike prices.
1275
A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
1276
An election forecast that’s 50-50 is not “giving up”
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might have mistakenly thought that, when predictions happened to…
1277
Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
We used to control apps like Facebook and Instagram with our own choices. They became daily comforts, making the world seem a little bit smaller and closer by bringing the people that we cared about together in to one place.
1278
Discworld Rules
And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists
1279
Betting on the Pope was the original prediction market
500 years before Polymarket, the Vatican fought to stop gambling on papal affairs. Should we worry that it’s back?
1280
Bye, Prime
Why? · As I wrote in Not an Amazon Problem (and please go read that if you haven’t) I don’t see myself as an enemy of Amazon, particularly. I think the pressures of 21st-century capitalism have put every large company into a place where they really can’t afford to be ethical or the financial sector will rip them to…
1281
Automatically tagging politician when they use their phone on the livestreams
How does it work? Every meeting of the flemish government in Belgium is live streamed on a youtube channel. When a livestream starts the software is searching for phones and tries to identify a distracted politician. This is done with the help of AI and face recognition. The video of the distracted politician are then…
1282
A few words about FiveThirtyEight
Silver Bulletin will begin publishing some new features soon — including Trump approval ratings. But the media just lost an extremely valuable resource.
1283
"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired
For other news from February, see my previous grapevine. This report is available free to the public. If you like my writings on genre issues, consider backing my Patreon.
1284
Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks
In January, Distributed Denial of Secrets published over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias, including American Patriots Three Percent (APIIII) and the Oath Keepers. The files were obtained by John Williams, a wilderness survival trainer who spent years deep undercover…
1285
NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to “use Apple encryption”
This is some really embarrassing timing on the Home Office’s (HO’s) part: a few weeks ago when news first broke of the HO’s demand for a backdoor in Apple ADP, I pointed out to MP…
1286
Skynet won and destroyed humanity
For a very long time, it appeared obvious to outside observers of the time flow that Skynet would never win the war, and never annihilate humanity.
1287
The Demoralization is just Beginning
This is a map of primary trading partners, US vs China, and how it has evolved over the last 20 years. Think about it, and realize this probably reflects your experience.
1288
Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas
Thomas Ptacek, a friend and expert witness in this lawsuit summed it up best in the court's hallway while walking within three feet of opposing counsel: "This is fucking stupid" .
1289
What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
I have used it for a long time - 20 years now, including for a while the IceWeasel variant - and I like it as a browser.
1290
Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008)
Alright, I’ve got another conspiracy theory misconception to dispel. :) After reading through the Chrome Terms of Service, some people are worried that Google is trying to assert rights on ev…