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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
The last word on Lily Allen and her anti-filesharing campaign
Honestly, the viral existence of this, the brilliance of it, the effort put in to write and perform it, the humour, the sentiments expressed...
Facebook knows who you are, and that's worth more than you think
It's very fashionable to declare that Facebook is an over-hyped fad and will never make any real money, certainly not enough to justify its ...
Pretending to be Wise
> The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral. > > —Dante Alighieri, famous hell expert > > —John F. Kenne…
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
Women Prefer Poaching
Men tend to want the woman they see in front of them, while women want the man other women see:
TikTok's Enshittification
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
The AI-Box Experiment
On the first occasion (in March 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and Nathan Russell simulated the gatekeeper. The AI’s handicap (the amount paid by the AI party to the gatekeeper party if not released) was set at $10. On the second occasion (in July 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and David…
A Selection Of Thoughts From Actual Women (regarding GoGaRuCo)
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Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation
Of all the objections I get from people about why they can’t ride a bike to get around, perhaps the most frustrating is the claim that bicycling is too dangerous. According to this line of re…
Faking votes on Hacker News
Hacker News is a site where users vote on links. When someone clicks on an up or down vote, their browser sends a GET request that looks like this: GET /vote?by= joesmith dir=upfor=8765309 A user can only vote if the by parameter matches their Hacker News login cookie. So for a third…
Edward O. Wilson: Marx was right, he had the wrong species
Among many other things, Edward Wilson is a myrmecologist and two times Pulitzer-prize winner. There is a picture taken by him of an ant holding between its mandibles a banner with the words: 'Onward Sociobiolo�gy!'. Following the publication in 1975 of his book Sociobi�ology, the New Synthesis , he became both to…
Poor Man's Email?
One of my favorite blogsports for the last couple of years is pondering what Twitter is. Here are some of the things I've come up with:
I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers—and televisions and iPods and everything else—to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your…
The MP3 Experiment
Last Saturday, Improv Everywhere staged its sixth annual MP3 Experiment, and it was open to anyone who wanted to play along. My son and I did.
The Road to Superintelligence (2015)
Part 1 of 2: "The Road to Superintelligence". Artificial Intelligence — the topic everyone in the world should be talking about.
JWZ and the Palm App Catalog, Part II
301 This blog has moved to jwz.org . This post has been archived here . Please update your links. 301
Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups