1591
The Moat of Low Status
It hurts, but less than you think
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1592
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.”
1593
The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
Trust me, I counted.
1594
Aging-related inflammation is not universal across human populations
Inflammation may not be a universal human experience, but a byproduct of industrialized lifestyles.
1595
Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers
Apple's anti-competitive App Store policies are gouging consumers, enabling censorship, and harming privacy-focused developers. We're joining a lawsuit to restore internet freedom.
1596
China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide
A new Oceana analysis reveals the global scale of China’s visible fishing fleet
1597
1598
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*.
1599
The Unsustainability of Moore's Law
Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles.
1600
Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
1601
Engineered Addictions
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention - and relationships
1602
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
1603
AI Is Dehumanization Technology
A call to reject the deployment and use of AI systems in Canada's public sector.
1604
1605
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.
1606
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.
1607
Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
Among adults who have not paid for news in the past year, the most common reason they cite is that they can find plenty of other news articles for free.
1608
The NO FAKES act has changed, and it's worse
A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out.The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to...
1609
Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything
Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar energy’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.
1610
The cultural decline of literary fiction
What happened?
1611
Requiem for a Solar Plant
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
1612
US Congress is making more than 250M acres of public lands available for sale
The Senate reconciliation package is a disturbing giveaway that will mandate the “disposal” of public lands across the western United States.
1613
Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp
Moving from WhatsApp to Signal is an important action, right now. WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, has been involved in several cases of election interference: America in 2016, Trinidad and Tobago …
1614
Samsung embeds IronSource spyware app on phones across WANA
In recent months, we have received numerous reports from users across West Asia and North Africa (WANA) expressing alarm over a little-known but deeply intrusive bloatware application—AppCloud—pre-installed on Samsung’s A and M series smartphones. Without users’ knowledge or consent, this bloatware collects sensitive…
1615
The JAWS shark is public domain
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
1616
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.
1617
Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration
We, people and civil society organisations from Europe and around the world, call on the European Commission to act now to break up the powerful Big Tech
1618
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.
1619
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…
1620
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…