Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals
OR: the long overdue forest fire
Read less HN
< Random thoughts of John Murray
Addiction Markets
Corporate gambling is economic coercion, a way to shift tax burdens away from the wealthy to the poor. It's been here since the 1970s, and now it's corrupting sports and young men. Abolish it.
2025 Letter
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way,
Moving money internationally
SWIFT operates a messaging protocol which ties banks together with correspondent banks. This collaboration enables most international wires.
Privacy Is Just the First Step, the Goal Is Data Ownership
Privacy for privacy sake is a weak argument, and privacy advocates should abandon it.
Defamed by ChatGPT
Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that “it remains to be seen” whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “dangerous.” I would beg to differ. I have been writing about th…
Stanford hates fun
Stanford hates fun is the title of the second Stanford article in the Wall Street Journal this week. (On the first, Stanford's guide to acceptable words , enough said already.)
An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)
This is a song about culture wars, futurism, apocalypta, and gun math. Click to read Handwaving Freakoutery, by BJ Campbell, a Substack publication.
Lying Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft put up an ad: Windows vs. iPad: Compare tablets - Microsoft Windows. It shows the iPad screen (left) compared with the ASUS VivoTab Smart screen (right). This is not to scale. Microsoft has d
The Moat of Low Status
It hurts, but less than you think
Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"
Trump admin sees China behind opposition to AI data centers
There are no "rogue" AI agents
Identifying them as such only lets companies like OpenAI off the hook.
Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
I Do Not Agree to Your Terms
Apple introduced their News app at WWDC, and the other day they sent me an e-mail saying they want to include this blog in News.
I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
In 2003, I wrote a book called Crap Towns. It seemed funny at the time. But plenty of people say it would not be possible to publish it today. Is that a problem?
Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
A personal blog, by a programmer and IT expert. Essays, Articles, Guides, and Recipes. As well as Code, Quotes, and Links.
I Hope Twitter Goes Away
About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. Though I’d been thinking about it for a while, ultimately leaving was a snap decision for me. Lately I’ve been reflecting on why I hate Twitter so much.
Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
Little League wants all your information
To sign kids up for our city’s Little League baseball …
Honestly.com – Not acting so honestly
I hate to have my first blog post after over a year be a negative one, but I feel like these guys need calling out. I recently received an email from a company, Honestly.com, that…