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Analytics: Hacker News v.s. a tweet from Elon Musk
My post Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” really took off. It sat at the top of Hacker News for a full day, and is …
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
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Flyover video of Jupiter’s Europa
NASA engineer Kevin Gill stitched together images from two 1998 observations of Europa by the Galileo spacecraft to create this super smooth flyover video of th
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The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think
The multi-skin toned handshake emoji reveals that it is more than a routine gesture
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The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
(Also see my follow-up post on getting organized, and sign up to my tiny letter to get contacted about fixing housing affordability in SF). San Francisco’s housing system is broken. The only way...
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On Being Disappeared
The entire archive of six years of my show On Contact has been disappeared from YouTube.
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German expressions that don’t exist in English
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I wonder if he would have said so if his native language wasn’t German. Whether one agrees with it or not (I personally would do so partially!), there’s some modern neuroscience that backs important portions…
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The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I
A recurring theme of this newsletter is the failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry.
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Decline of the Dad Job
Before I learnt to read I made sense of the world by conjuring up images in my mind, particularly for abstract concepts. I could count before I could read and had an image for each number. Many of …
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AI Is Dehumanization Technology
A call to reject the deployment and use of AI systems in Canada's public sector.
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Is stuff online worth saving?
I’ll admit, the question took me back a bit. But I’d say yes, it is.
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Commuters prefer origin to destination transfers
It’s an empirical observation that rail riders who are faced with a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if it’s near their home than near their destination. Reinhard Clever&#…
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Waffle House's Magic Marker System
I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orde
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Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects
HS2 has become a case study in how not to build infrastructure. But what if we’d taken a different path entirely? In this post, I imagine how the Swiss would have done it: starting with the timetable, not the project. It’s a counterfactual, but it’s not a fantasy.
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A “perfect” voting system
A voting system that sidesteps Arrow's theorem entirely. The scare quotes around
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Real name policies and ruling the world
Launch your business with WordPress or Website Builder using AI tools, templates, and reliable hosting.
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4999
Looming Liability Machines (LLMs)
As part of our zoom reading group ( wow, 4.5 years old now ), we discussed a paper that uses LLMs for automatic root cause analysis (RCA) fo...
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Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)
In a beautiful, rollicking piece last month for Aeon Magazine, web developer James Somers ponders the question, Are coders worth it?
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P(doom)
Are we all going to die?
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Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor (2011)
September 2011 Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich. —Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera , 22 Feb. 2011 It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic p
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Why Pessimism Sounds Smart
Optimism requires believing in an unknown, unproven future
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T-Mobile USA doesn't comply with its German parent company’s GDPR policies
The Practical Nomad: Edward Hasbrouck's blog
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Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)
This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011.