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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
2612
WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding
What WWDC 2026 actually revealed about a foldable iPhone, which clues are confirmed or reported, and why Apple’s adaptable software matters to developers.
2613
I don't have a smartphone or at least I wish I didn't
I Don’t Have a Smartphone… par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Firefox removes RSS support
gHacks recently reported that Mozilla plans to remove support for RSS & Atom related features. Specifically Live Bookmarks and their feed reader.
2616
"Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
You're absolutely right!
2617
Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
AI made competent output cheap. That raises the value of taste and exposes its limits. The real edge is judgment paired with context, stakes, and the will to build.
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My deepfake DALL-E 2 vacation photos passed the Turing Test
I went on a real vacation, and created photos of a fake vacation using DALL-E 2. Most people couldn't tell the difference.
2620
Third editor fired in Elsevier’s citation cartel crackdown
"This is not a series of coincidences; it is a blatant, industrial-scale quid pro quo."
2621
Mitch Hedberg and GIS
Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. Last night after the kids were asleep, I sat down with a beer (Sierra Nevada) and figured out how I could get the data and perform the calculation.
2622
Statistics, Fast and Slow
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 April 2018. One way to understand China is to look at the statistics. Real income per person has increased nearly tenfold since 1990. Si…
2623
Powerchair: A dad hacks a wheelchair for his disabled 2-year-old son
We wanted Alejandro to have a power wheelchair. We wanted him to be able to move through the world by his own volition and it’s clear that the ability to independently explore his environment is important for his cognitive development on multiple levels. We tried going through the typical process of obtaining a power…
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In defense of cryptocurrency
Last week a group of technologists, including Bruce Schneier, sent a letter to Congress outlining their concerns around cryptocurrency and urging Congress to regulate the space. Now let me be the f…
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The war on gifted education
Why the landslide loss for San Francisco's school board is a victory for American meritocracy
2629
The Moral Economy of the Shire
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
2630
Stack Overflow Culture
This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A…
2631
How bad are things?
One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people. I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ra…
2632
High beef prices and the destruction of independent cattle ranching
Agricultural economists manipulated data to block Congress from acting on high beef prices and the destruction of independent cattle ranching. Why? Because they think monopolies are good.
2633
PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory
An exposé no one will read, about the widespread falsification of user posts in PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001. This is a microcosm of the death of the human-written Internet.
2634
My Talk at Microsoft
It is now public knowledge that on 4 September 2019 I gave a talk at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. I was invited and I accepted. The report of this has led to a certain amount of speculation and rumor.
2635
Blocked by JSConf.eu Twitter account
Some people are probably pretty used to various blocking endeavours on social media. I am not one of them…
2636
The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
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So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes
The Play Store does not run on my old devices; this led me to accidentally experience some joy while using Android.
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OnStar Begins Spying On Customers’ GPS Location For Profit
I canceled the OnStar subscription on my new GMC vehicle today after receiving an email from the company about their new terms and conditions. While most people, I imagine, would hit the delete button when receiving something as exciting as new terms and conditions, being the nerd sort, I decided to have a personal…