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LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
LLMs suck at comedy, art, journalism, research, and science for the same fundamental reason
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Reddit has the killer social network feature: anonymity
As a follow-on to my last post, about facebook needing the ability to forget, I'm going to put forward a premise - the Reddit's social featu...
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Universities should be more than toll gates
Personal writing by Walid Dib, and a collection of games, apps, and companies I’ve built.
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Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?
Around this time last year, I wrote a post dissecting the decline of The Simpsons from its peak in the mid 90s finding that the golden age of the show spanned an incredible 214 episodes. As a comparison, Friends, which seemed to have been on TV forever, managed 236 episodes...
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The forgotten meaning of "jerk"
Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer asks “When did jerk stop meaning ‘stupid’?” He starts with the Steve Martin movie The Jerk , saying of its protagonist:
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A few words about FiveThirtyEight
Silver Bulletin will begin publishing some new features soon — including Trump approval ratings. But the media just lost an extremely valuable resource.
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Don't Be Frupid
Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.
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What is the point of an online conference?
My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming. They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.
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Sane Thinking About Mental Health Problems
Epistemic status: exhortatory and personal, but pretty confidently my true belief CW: suicide mention When I was a teenager, I was depressed. And the way I thought mental illness worked, the way I…
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Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
I just bought 3 domain names from GoDaddy. No, that is not news, the news is that I had to use a US based VPN before the purchase went through. (the VPN made the godaddy server think I was browsing from the US). The first 50 times I tried making
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Software sucks
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
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A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image used on my twitter archive. I gave in and paid it, but what does that mean for open graph images and copyright?
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On software popularity
Donald Knuth once said: If I find too many people adopting a certain idea I’d probably think it’s wrong .
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After accidental vote, EU copyright bill faces three legitimacy issues
Domain registriert bei united-domains.de
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Things You Can Do That Will Make You Happier
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It's also no surprise that it's the Nr....
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The disappearing inventor
Mark Bolas , a professor at USC, an astonishingly prolific innovator, has invented or co-invented many things. One of those things was FOV2GO, an ingenious way to make a very inexpensive, very wide angle virtual reality display.
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The Mother of All ‘Abandoned’ Airports (2015)
West Berlin's lifeline during the Soviet Blockade, Tempelhof Airport has since become the city’s biggest park. Berliners will fight to keep it that way.
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Fixing Google Map Transit Feed Mistakes in Taiwan
Probably one of the nerdier things I do in my free time is fix and report transit errors on Google Maps. Accurate transit directions and schedules are extremely important if we want more people to take transit more often, especially in scenarios where good transit options exist! I do these bug reports and the…
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A game of tag that’s been going for 20+ years
A group of high school friends has been playing an elaborate game of tag since reconnecting at a reunion almost 30 years ago. A few years ago, one of the player
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Competition vs. Community
So, some people are going to hate me for this post, and I've said some of this before, but I really want to express it in more detail. I've been wanting to write something like this for a long time, and recently I think I've been in a mindset where I need to think through some of these thoughts anyway, so "here goes…
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GDPR complaints against Google’s deceptive practices to track user location
Based on new research published today by BEUC’s Norwegian member Forbrukerrådet, seven consumer groups are filing complaints against Google with their national data protection authorities.