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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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Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
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IT Concepts That Non-IT People Don’t Get
Where tech meets curiosity
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Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
Update, 2017-09-25 Hi! This essay is undergoing a long-overdue rewrite. In the meantime, consider my 2015 follow-up essay, Obergefell v. Hodges: the database engineering perspective....
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Hacking your food supply
A perennial problem for my wife and I run into while bootstrapping our business is the lack of time. It seems like the daily grind of cooking, cleaning and shopping tends to eat up most of our available time that we have.
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The Shocking State of Contemporary "Mathematics"
I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS (sectional) meeting at Penn State, last weekend, and realized that the Kingdom of Mathematics is dead. Instead we have a disjoint union of narrow specialties , and people who know everything about nothing, and nothing about anything (except their very narrow acre). Not…
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Grad School Enrollment vs. Unemployment Rate
Link to Piled Higher and Deeper
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Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
Regarding Randall Stross’s piece in The New York Times claiming the problem isn’t AT&T’s network, but rather the iPhone’s hardware.
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Discrete Analysis – A new type of math journal
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
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How Depressions Work
On Capitol Hill sit many powerful people — Congressmen, Senators, Justices — but also numerous others who do the daily work of keeping government running. And, like anyone with such a weighty responsibility, they sometimes want a break: a chance to see a movie or eat out with their spouse.
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Hacking Education
I spent a lot of time on this blog in the past month exhorting everyone to give teaching tools to the neediest public schools. I did that because education is possibly the most important thing we can do for our world and our children. But I also believe the the public school system in this […]
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Guessing the Teacher's Password
When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, so…
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Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service
Update 3 : Please see my follow-up post about Twitter's response. I started using Twitter in March 2007, just before their SXSW explosion. Not surprisingly, I instantly became addicted and since then have used the service for everything from personal to professional. Overall, Twitter is a g
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How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
The Digital Imprimatur
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Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds
If you allow players in an online world to penalize each other, you open the door to extortion: One of the features that supported user socialization in the game was the ability to declare that another user was a trusted friend. The feature involved a graphical display that showed the faces of users who had declared…
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Schneier reviews: Here Comes Everybody
In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don’t people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market’s transaction…
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Nicholas Wade: Origin of Covid – Following the Clues
“” is published by Nicholas Wade.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: That Alien Message
Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale). Potential Einsteins are o…
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