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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
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Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
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Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House
I reverse-engineered Waffle House's website to build a live version of the (unofficial) Waffle House Index, and got a cease and desist for it.
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Using Silk Road
History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1
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Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons
Except me. As of one minute ago I confirmed what I noticed last Wednesday. According to the all seeing Google, on the entire world wide web there are but three Creative Commons licensed images of a…
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Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards
AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞
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DHS asks Mozilla to take down MafiaaFire add-on
From time to time, we receive government requests for information, usually market information and occasionally subpoenas. Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and reque…
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The NSA: An Inside View
In which I relate my experience as an NSA employee and impart my thoughts on the policies in place, my former coworkers, and the current cyber war.
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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter
A letter from a disgusted teacher: I QUIT Kris L. Nielsen Monroe, NC 28110 Union County Public Schools Human Resources Department 400 North Church Street Monroe, NC 28112 October 25, 2012 To All it…
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Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal b…
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IPhone vs Android? No. We're fighting the wrong fight
We have been distracted by ridiculous arguments and fabricated “wars” for too long. We have been distracted by thinking that Google is Microsoft and Apple is Apple in a doomed fight alr…
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Gitlab Blocked Iranians’ Access
Ahmad Haghighi’s personal page.
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Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
Facebook unfriended me. Why? So far as I can tell, it’s because I’ve been using Facebook to advocate for decentralization of social media. And apparently th ...
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Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers? Update: seemingly not Update: Oh yeah!
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Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the...
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Europe's Software Problem
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms. For a variety of reasons, this is not a good idea. As stated recently by Charles Michel, President of the…
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Simplicity of IRC
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…
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The realities of being a pop star
According to my experience...
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This Is 2016 Not 2012
Her eyebrows knot themselves. A pencil grates back and forth on her legal pad. Scratch. Scratch. My back itches; a tiny incessant itch that demands more at
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Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines
Will Smith is being accused of generating fake fans with AI, but it's complicated: the crowds are real, but the videos were manipulated by Smith's team and YouTube itself.
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Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure of our scientific…
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How Zidisha (YC W14) Is Misleading the Public About Its Interest Rates
Of all the microcredit innovators in recent years, one of the most interesting has been Zidisha.org. As Wikipedia explains , "Zidisha is...
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TPP Text Confirms Massive Loss to Canadian Public Domain
The New Zealand government posted the official Trans Pacific Partnership text today after years secret negotiations and occasional leaks of the text. It is an enormous deal with dozens of side letters between countries - Canada alone has eight side letters on intellectual property with seven TPP countries - that will…