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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,147 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)
From The World I Live In , by Helen Keller Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world....
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“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
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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.
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Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
A vibe coding thought exercise on what it might look like for LLMs to scour human historical data at scale and in retrospect.
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Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?
I generated 1,000+ SVGs across 7 frontier models to test whether AI labs are training on Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark.
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What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
tautology.town is a blog that contains tautologies.
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One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants
There are a few cloud kitchen restaurants that deliver food that is so shit that I want to know which other brands are being run from the same kitchen so that I can avoid them all.
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Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
We have public schools for a reason.
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IBM's Asshole Test
Some years back I applied to join IBM's grad scheme, there was a peculiar stage to the process I've not seen elsewhere. It was during the onsite day, where a batch of 20 or so applicants were put through various tests in an IBM office. They called it the "group test"; around 8 of us were led to a room and asked to…
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The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the …
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End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance
The controversial mass surveillance of private messages in Europe is coming to an end. After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterda
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I hope work from home continues
I just hope my employer continues to allow me to work remotely. Working from home I: Have been exceeding production for the past year Don't have to share a keyboard/mouse/desk with another shift (gross). Do not spend an hour a day(+/- 10 minutes) driving, and save all the money associated
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Airbnb and security camera disclosure
This post got *a lot* of attention. I’m super happy about that because I had been afraid that we had reached a point where we collectively didn’t care about cameras or meaningful disclosure. Although, to that point here’s a comment someone posted: "I just assume that there will be camera constantly recording when I…
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Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance
The European Commission wants to turn digital communication apps, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, TikTok and X, into mass surveillance tools so that digital communications of all EU citizens, including their live conversations, photos and videos, can be automatically scanned for criminal offences.[1] Even of…
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Is the madness ever going to end?
There is something seriously wrong with the IT industry. It's so bad that I haven't managed to find a single industry with the same massive amount of stupidity, with the exception of perhaps the fashion industry.
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If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees
Founder: Hey Joe! How are you doing? Everyone here loved meeting you, and we would really love to have you on board as our investor! We really respect your expertise, and think this could be a grea…
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If you love a website, back it up
This story starts with a little tragedy. See, I’ve got these old webpages I love to go back and look on every now and then. There’s websites that h...
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US Secret Service: “Massive Fraud” Against State Unemployment Insurance Programs
A well-organized Nigerian crime ring is exploiting the COVID-19 crisis by committing large-scale fraud against multiple state unemployment insurance programs, with potential losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a new alert issued by the U.S. Secret Service .
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Being deaf
What does being deaf mean, in practical terms?
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What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people, in pursuit of a contrived-to-be-fun mission, turns out to be, well, fun.
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Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment