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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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“She doesn’t deserve to be alive”
What is success? When do you reach it? Is life different? Are you happy? And if it's not the shining golden star that it ought to be, is it still worth it?
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'Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe Meets the Koch Brothers
If you haven't seen it, my name appeared a few weeks ago in a headline next to Koch Industries
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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…
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The Approval Economy
Why every purchase is a performance “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.” — Thomas Cooley About a month ago, I published what has become my mo…
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There are infinite worlds to explore
There are infinite worlds to explore.
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Amazon Smile Gets a Frown
I’m pretty sure how the first meetings went almost a decade ago: “Well, we’re paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. If we pay charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, i…
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Worst-Case Thinking
At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with…
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The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
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Briar and Bramble: A Vision for Decentralized Infrastructure
What if we could build secure systems that didn't depend on central servers or even Internet access to let people collaborate? What would a system like this mean for political organizing, disaster relief, or even civic infrastructure? The Briar app and the Bramble framework are an attempt to find out.
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Chat Control 2.0 through the back door
Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a "deceptive sleight of hand," a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive tha
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There Is No CD Revival
Unless Maybe You are Adele
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Thought Examinations, Indoctrination Meetings and Struggle Sessions
On the mechanics of totalitarian terror in Mao's China.
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What did Google+ get right?
Google+ got some things awfully wrong. They lost and they were hated. But many of us thought it was the best social network that existed...
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Developers don't build cheaper housing because we make it illegal (2014)
One of the protests against allowing more housing construction is that supply and demand has failed – that developers only want to build luxury units or that the global elite will invariably buy al…
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London vs San Francisco – back and forth
This site is mainly a storage cupboard for things I've tinkered with along the way, such as:
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The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay
A couple years ago, GM made waves by saying that soon, all their new cars would be completely free of Apple's CarPlay and Android Auto support, instead opting for the "Android Automotive OS" in their cars. Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of CarPlay for basic safety reasons and
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Iowa Caucuses, the Blob, and the Democratic Party Cartel
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
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The Benefits of Being a Female Software Engineer
Jean Hsu - Fractional VP Engineering | Engineering Leadership for Startups
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How the Fed “Went Broke”
For the first time in modern history, the Fed is operating at a loss. This article explores what that means for savers and investors.
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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…