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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The bait-and-switch hidden in today’s cookie announcement
T oday is going to be the day that you read a lot about the UK’s intention to kill cookie pop-ups as part of its post-Brexit Data Reform Bill. By now you should have somehow realised that there’s a bit more to it than that, and that your work is not set to get any easier.
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How Many Tracks Do Train Stations Need?
A brief discussion on Reddit about my post criticizing Penn Station expansion plans led me to write a very long comment, which I’d like to hoist to a full post explaining how big an urban tra…
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The Cult Inside Google
I worked for Google for about three and a half years as a video producer. I was fired because I raised alarm about a doomsday cult that…
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Interview with Marc Andreessen on learning to love the humanities, and RSS
The real challenge to building on the frontier? Figuring out human behavior.
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Human attention has become a commodity
Fake news. Misinformation. Mental health crises. Election meddling. Extremism. Partisanship. Eating Disorders. Body Dysmorphia. Vulnerability porn.
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We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do
Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one.
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How Trustpilot Extorts Businesses
Trustpilot promises to be “free and open” — in reality, they are the exact opposite, holding companies at ransom, and outright violating…
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Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
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Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus
In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: Copied JSON to 📋⧉ JSON"hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun"…
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Computers are an oppressive technology
This may seem a strange heading for someone whose career is in computers, yet I feel that this article has been a lifetime in the making. It is the product of intuitive observations and things that have stood out to me, even as a child, who even then could sense the sinister side of the most banal of technologies.
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It matters how you raise your kids
To parents besieged by expert advice, a new scientific idea offers relief: it’s no big deal how you raise your children....
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Inflation, part 1: On shelter futures
A deep-dive
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In defense of cryptocurrency
Last week a group of technologists, including Bruce Schneier, sent a letter to Congress outlining their concerns around cryptocurrency and urging Congress to regulate the space. Now let me be the f…
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Why is American administrative capacity in decline?
Some speculative hypotheses
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Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer
After trying many ways to get around paywalls, I've landed on 12ft.io. It's simply awesome.
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Walking the World: Seoul
Consumption, brutality, and the cute
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Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy. People living in Norway are used to
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Notes on Effective Altruism
Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at…
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Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
It's not just the music biz—legacy media outlets everywhere are playing the same dangerous game. Here's how it will play out.
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Science Is Getting Harder
Evidence that discoveries are getting smaller on average
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Behind the Scenes: The pots, pans, and people that make millions of meals
Our recipe for feeding includes giant paella pans, combi ovens, and a lot of love!
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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
Or How Competition Returns to Elite Colleges
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Thin Platforms
The Microsoft and Stripe developer keynotes were both examples of the rise of Thin Platforms
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So I took a corporation to arbitration
I'm Shu. This site is mainly to document long distance running while on a ketogenic diet. Sometimes there are posts about technology.
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Programming in the Apocalypse
A climate change what-if Over a few beers... Growing up, I was obsessed with space. Like many tech workers, I consumed everything I could find about space and space travel. Young me was convinced we were on the verge of space travel, imagining I would live to see colonies
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What is the web revival?
Hello, brave netizen! If you’ve found your way onto this guide then you have embarked on the first exciting step into the Web Revival. This guide will give you the low down on all things web! By the end of it you’ll know what the Web Revival is, what it stands for, and how you can take part in it; grab your browser…
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