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Lead is still bad for your brain
Wait, wasn't this solved by the Romans? Anyway, my grandma ate lead paint and she was totally fine.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,067 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
5552
Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters
One of my commenters reports that he showed my essay on evaluating the harm from closed-source software to Richard Stallman, who became upset by it. It shouldn’t be news to RMS or anyone else that I think he’s a fanatic and this is a problem, but it seems that every few years I have to explain the problem again. I…
5553
Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
5554
The falling nutritional value of crops
The mineral content of wheat and rice is lower today than sixty years ago. Why is that and what does it mean for how we eat?
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The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware (2020)
Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and…
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The Government Uses Zero Days for “Offense”
Little by little, the government is opening up about its use of computer security vulnerabilities. Last month, the NSA disclosed that it has historically “released more than 91% of vulnerabilities discovered in products that have gone through our internal review process and that are made and used...
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Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)
Based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005—one entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification."
5561
How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists
Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted…
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Improving support for adult content on Mastodon
Using the Blurhash algorithm in Mastodon 2.8.1 to generate prettier previews for sensitive media
5563
The Patriot Act Has Threatened Freedom for 20 Years
In passing the PATRIOT Act, Congress enacted a “solution” to preventing another 9/11-like debacle without having any evidence that a lack of surveillance powers was what allowed Osama bin Laden’s suicide hijackers to succeed in killing nearly 3,000 Americans.
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AI children's books, body horror edition
Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content.
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Useful Spy Books
Reading a good book is a great joy. And recommending a good book is almost as enjoyable. I’ve long been fascinated by books on espionage, and this contributed in no small part to me eventually joining the Dutch intelligence world, and later, rejoining it in some fashion. If you have favorite books that should be on…
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Thomas Jefferson and Apple versus the FBI
When Prohibition began, anti-alcohol crusaders demanded that the St. Louis Public Library burn every book that explained "the home production of alcohol for drinks". The librarian insisted on keeping the books but agreed to hide them from the "general public".
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Hacker News Highlights: April and May 2018
Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from April and May. If you see something cool like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com [mailto:hn@ycombinator.com] so we can add it to the next list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HN users across countries discuss…
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The Clock in the Mountain
A work crane at the Clock site in western Texas. There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the … Continue reading →
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The planning of U.S. physician shortages (2020)
Misguided modeling created a "physician surplus" narrative, the harmful consequences of which we are still dealing with today.
5572
Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
Readers with long memories may recall the brief, inglorious UK fuel shortage of a few weeks ago, which was mostly caused by the rush to refuel for fear the pumps would run dry. Some petrol stations…
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Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction
Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) is a condition in which sexual function does not return to normal after the use of SSRIs and related antidepressants.
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72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes
The US dollar lost 96.9% of its value since 1914. Four inflationary episodes spanning 29% of the time caused 72% of the destruction. Monthly dataset, 1,357 obs.
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The Sucker Complex
One is killed every minute
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The Pirate Bay Is The World’s Most Efficient Public Library
The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This...
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Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020216 points205 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
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Cruel optimism and lazy pessimism
Do you remember the avocado toast guy? I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus recently (you should read it, it’s great), and I learned that someone1 has come up with a name for this sort of modern reinterpretation of “let them eat cake”: cruel optimism. Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it2, boils down to the folly…
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LLMs Are Not Fun
I got into programming because it let me turn thought into reality. If I could reason precisely, then a computer could carry out my thoughts unerringly. I could step away from tiring, ambiguous human interaction for a while.
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