Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,148 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
4091

Freeing My Phone from Google

Phones are so full of ads that you don’t even notice them anymore. Suggestions and notifications you didn’t ask for, tracking mechanisms you don’t even know are there, services over which you have no control. It’s absurd how much smartphones, a large extension of our private and social lives, are controlled and…

4092

The Closing of the Frontier

T he Anthropic Mythos announcement is the first time in my life I’ve felt truly poor. Maybe because I grew up on the internet and it was the one permissionless place where you could have leverage and a shot at uncapped exploration and ambition. That is now changing with the gap between models that are publicly…

4103

Leaving in a Huff

One thing you may not know about me is that I am a writer. More specifically, I'm a freelance writer. This means I can have several clients at once, work from home in my underwear, and set my own hours. It is basically like being a prostitute, but with less stringent hygiene requirements.

4104

Blowback from the NSA surveillance.

There’s one piece of blowback that isn’t being discussed—aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade—and that’s how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US’s role in Internet governance. Ron Deibert makes this point: But…