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
Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
Wikipedia's "NPOV" is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call "false balance."
Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
Minimum steps necessary to give business investors confidence in the United States
Anxiety, Depression, Technology, and Me
This is a personal story. I have never shared much of this. I am a regular blogger, but this felt too personal to write as myself. I neede...
In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”
These are apparently America’s top under-25 entrepreneurs. Allow me to summarize: they are: A guy who rents airplanes to wealthy bored people. Not a bad idea, but … being the Avis of av…
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
Eric Raymond on "Hiding the Decline, Part 1"
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
A critique of The Black Swan
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.
How did we geeks become experts on macroeconomics?
There are certain topics that are certain to incite the internet. Emacs vs vi. Programming language holy wars. When it comes to programming geeks, though, I’ve got one that will get them to break out the flamethrowers . All you have to do is bring up topics like fiat currency, the gold standard, money creation, the…
Jason Scott: "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it."
A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. It shut down on October 31…
Internet Mail 2000
The sender's ISP, rather than the receiver's ISP, is the always-online post office from which the receiver picks up the message.
A Non-Local Revolution
Paul Graham has recently argued for two points: first, that tech startups will continue to collect in Silicon Valley . Second, that startups may represent a new economic phase , replacing the corporate ladder of old . Now he’s suggesting that these two effects combined might lead to a very local economic revolution .