151
Making the Internet Boring
I once overrode my own website blocker for 444 minutes. After that I stopped relying on willpower and started making the internet boring: app deletions, LeechBlock, grayscale mode, and a custom userscript.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
152
Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
An emoji flipbook presentation by Alex Komoroske about how dysfunctional organizational dyanmics arise even when individuals are well-behaved
153
No country for mediocre mathematicians
White lies of AI from a struggling geometer
154
The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
155
What I learned from my mom (1941-2026)
My mom and I had a daily practice for many years: We would exchange gratitude emails.
156
The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now
Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future
157
You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It
FDR has always been one of my favorite presidents, second maybe to Lincoln. Both were men the establishment assumed were one of them until, to their horror, they governed like they weren't. Both could trash the opposition in one breath and take the moral high ground in the next.
158
Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash
The backlash against data centers is difficult to understand if your salary depends on your not understanding it.
159
C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality
You might have heard that C2PA is a technology that will miraculously save us from rampant AI forgeries, by having cameras cryptographically sign the images they capture. Hooray for cryptography !
160
How much of HN is AI?
TL;DR: 62% as of September 2026. This is up from ~40% in February.
161
Anger, Anxiety and Agency
Who is the AI villain we should be angry at?
162
Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence
Infrastructure “We should own our infrastructure.” A lot of people would instinctively nod in agreement with that statement. Yet who “we” refers to shifts depending on the type of infrastructure. Highways, railways, bridges, and ports require nation-scale efforts. The water supply is usually put into the hands of…
163
The Future Belongs to the Weird
the gospel for those out of distribution
164
Everything I own, owned
Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.
165
The Vibe Tax
Pol had 12 hours, a blank repo, and a fresh weekly quota. By morning, only one of those remained.
166
Explain it to me like I'm ten
In 2012, the creator of the xkcd cartoon Randall Munroe unveiled Up Goer Five — a detailed diagram of the Saturn V rocket, annotated using only the most common 1,000 (sorry, “ten hundred”) words in…
167
Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that…
168
Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10k individuals may be neurotypical
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.
169
I dream of quieter computing
A quick note about future of computing and indieweb. It's about a 2 minute read.
170
171
A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is a song about regret, asking for forgiveness, and wanting another chance after having hurt someone. But philosophically speaking, what exactly makes an apology morally meaningful?
172
I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
How an expired nameserver let me take over e164.arpa zones for multiple territories, and why I probably should have checked my logs sooner.
173
New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
Don’t let the absence of a flying car in your garage distract you: we are definitely now living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson. Every day I notice a news story tha…
174
I'm becoming AI-blind
Recently I've been catching myself having these little moments at work, when I'm trying to read a document someone has sent me and my brain somehow refuses to analyze it. It feels like I'm reading it, but I'm unable to focus on its content. I sat down to analyze these situations and realized they all have a common…
175
It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
This 404 report justly been getting considerable coverage. Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training dat...
176
Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk because I need some chill
177
Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos
OR: The Great Switcheroo
178
Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
A new way to think about brainpower.
179
Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
Trying to obfuscate the web is a bad, pointless idea
180
Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !