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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,070 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
LLMs suck at comedy, art, journalism, research, and science for the same fundamental reason
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Reddit has the killer social network feature: anonymity
As a follow-on to my last post, about facebook needing the ability to forget, I'm going to put forward a premise - the Reddit's social featu...
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How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
Public Health professor discusses how ultra-processed foods are a direct legacy of the tobacco industry, and are responsible for a dramatic rise in obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases across the country.
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Universities should be more than toll gates
Personal writing by Walid Dib, and a collection of games, apps, and companies I’ve built.
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Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?
Around this time last year, I wrote a post dissecting the decline of The Simpsons from its peak in the mid 90s finding that the golden age of the show spanned an incredible 214 episodes. As a comparison, Friends, which seemed to have been on TV forever, managed 236 episodes...
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The forgotten meaning of "jerk"
Ben Lindbergh at the Ringer asks “When did jerk stop meaning ‘stupid’?” He starts with the Steve Martin movie The Jerk , saying of its protagonist:
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A few words about FiveThirtyEight
Silver Bulletin will begin publishing some new features soon — including Trump approval ratings. But the media just lost an extremely valuable resource.
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Don't Be Frupid
Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.
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Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions
Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions lays out the devastating impact of the shrinking and consolidation of local news outlets.
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Hacker News as a case study to test the wisdom of the crowd theory
Marketing Plan: What It Is & How to Create One (With Examples)
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What is the point of an online conference?
My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming. They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.
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US Congress is making more than 250M acres of public lands available for sale
The Senate reconciliation package is a disturbing giveaway that will mandate the “disposal” of public lands across the western United States.
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Sane Thinking About Mental Health Problems
Epistemic status: exhortatory and personal, but pretty confidently my true belief CW: suicide mention When I was a teenager, I was depressed. And the way I thought mental illness worked, the way I…
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Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
I just bought 3 domain names from GoDaddy. No, that is not news, the news is that I had to use a US based VPN before the purchase went through. (the VPN made the godaddy server think I was browsing from the US). The first 50 times I tried making
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Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data
If you’re fed up with Meta right now, you’re not alone. Meta tracks you across millions of websites and apps and its business model relies on your data. If you want to limit Meta’s ability to collect and profit from your personal data, here’s what you need to know.
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JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons
JSTOR is now available in 1,000 prisons across 4 continents, supporting the education and growth of more than 550,000 incarcerated people.
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Software sucks
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
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Why We’re Suing NSO
Some of the most courageous journalists in the world write for El Faro, a Salvadoran news organization whose fearless, independent reporting about corruption, violence, and human rights abuses in Central America has earned it the gratitude of readers all over the world—and the enmity of criminal gangs and…
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A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history
Three months ago, a German court ruled that part of a Wikipedia article—found to be defamatory in a previous court decision—had to be removed from both the article and its associated revision tracker, known as a “history” page. (History pages allow anyone to see how a Wikipedia article has developed since they were…