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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,068 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing
I’m in the middle of taking the Coursera Machine Learning class -- which has been amazingly good -- and it recently covered how one could implement a machine-learning algorithm to power driverless cars.
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Why Facebook's 'Frictionless Sharing' violates HTTP
Facebook has this new feature , whereby the act of simply reading a web page, under certain conditions, gets it posted to your news feed, ...
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Culture eats policy
The government has a culture problem, making it difficult to implement well-intentioned policies.
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Covid-19 contact tracing study finds children key to spread
Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute find the continued spread of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.
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Meanwhile, just East of Silicon Valley, in Tupelo Mississippi...
I did an unvacation in Tupelo, Mississippi this past week. An unvacation is my new M.O., in which I travel to someplace fun but don’t take significant time off while there. My old friends Henderson and Rebecca live in Tupelo, and it was a really special opportunity to spend some time with them. One of the many great…
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The core Internet institutions abandon the US Government
In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the US government. With…
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The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
Discover how communication patterns shape team performance, innovation, and collective intelligence. Learn why idea flow matters more than talent alone.
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We’re 10 today
On our tenth birthday we can look back on a year in which our free and open world map has gone from strength to strength, being deployed by large companies such as Apple, Mapquest and Foursquare, and relief organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and the American Red Cross.
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Arkham Quixote (2020)
“There’s that sort of sense that many technical people will see or feel when you see something and you know what it could be, and you know it could be important, and you see companies just doing it wrong — there’s that powerful desire to fix it and do it right and show them sort of how it’s supposed to be done”
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On the dangers of cryptocurrencies and the uselessness of blockchain
Earlier this month, I and others wrote a letter to Congress, basically saying that cryptocurrencies are an complete and total disaster, and urging them to regulate the space. Nothing in that letter is out of the ordinary, and is in line with what I wrote about blockchain in 2019. In response, Matthew Green has…
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Winter & Cold Weather EV Range Loss in 7,000 Cars
All vehicles lose efficiency and range in very cold weather. Electric cars are no different. The good news, however, is that this range loss is temporary and not as limiting as many people may think.
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Reasons Not to Use Google (2015)
Google is forcing its bullshit generator, Gemini, on many users of Gmail without asking them, and not even offering the users a way to deactivate it.
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The magic of the Japanese convenience store sandwich
Why is the Japanese Convenience Store Sandwich so iconic? After eating (a lot of) them on my past trips I decided it was time to find out exactly why they are so moreish! There are
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A Worsening Culture War
When leaders run out of unifying myths, division is the last currency. Why this Thanksgiving, America is a "death cult" versus "radical socialists"
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I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype
I truly and passionately hate hype. From the fakeness of it to the sheer stupidity it represents, but perhaps most of all, because of the devastating consequence it often results in.
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Web 3.0 – The Great Con
I'll say it - web 3.0 is a meaningless buzzword, and blockchain and cryptocurrency is nothing more than a giant fraud.
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Research in psychology: are we learning anything?
OR: The mystery of the televised salad
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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
These candidates were assessed on a variety of axes, most importantly Community Participation Guideline enforcement and accessibility, but also including team requirements from engineering, organizational-values alignment, usability, utility and cost. To close out, I’ll talk about the options we haven’t chosen and…
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I was right about ATProto key management
Note: this post has been revised to be split into two sections: a description of what happened, and my analysis. I hope to make it clear that, while I do not like ATProto in general, I am trying to make good-faith critcisms of specific design decisions and outcomes, and in fact, this post getting updoots on HackerNews…
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Founder Ethics
One of the most valuable parts of Y Combinator is our community. As of Summer 2014, we have funded over 1,400 founders, and as the YC family grows, the continued strength of our network depends on founders behaving well. Starting with this batch (YC S14), we’ll be asking founders to review YC’s statement of founder…
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Brown student maps the hidden global labor powering AI
Cunyan Ma’s interactive tool exposes the power structure that extracts low-wage labor from data workers in the Global South to make everyday AI algorithms function.
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Living Only on Bitcoins
I’ve been interested in BitCoin since the very beginning but, until now, I considered BTC some very nice cryptographic experiment with high potential but almos…
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The cost of the “new way to message on instagram” (2020)
If you are on Instagram, you have been probably bombarded by Instagram Stories and notifications about new features like emojis, chat themes, selfie stickers, and “cross-platform messaging” that will allow you to exchange direct messages with, and search for, friends who are on Facebook. But the...
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When it comes to composition and length, passwords mostly don't matter
When it comes to composition and length, your password (mostly) doesn’t matter.
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Stop Killing Games
tl;dr: If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here. Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition. A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down. YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected. Luckily, I have enough reach I was…