Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,072 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
ChatGPT is really good at roleplaying
ChatGPT is really good at roleplaying as strange and unusual characters with minimal prompting.
Arduino Terms of Service and Privacy Policy update: setting the record straight
We’ve heard some questions and concerns following our recent Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates. We are thankful our community cares enough to
Venture capital is going to murder Medium
It’s a crying shame, really. I love Medium. It’s the best writing environment on the web, and they sweat the details like nobody else. The community too is just peach. This could have been a love s…
Hate Mail and the New Religious Wars in Tech
How could something as inanimate, mass-produced and commoditized as a cellphone get people worked up enough to send hate mail to a tech reviewer?
Why Can't I Take an Orange Through Customs?
Fruit flies, agroterrorism, and how a healthy snack became a threat to national security.
The iPhone obsession
Since my attempts at capturing web developers’ hearts and minds by publishing fundamental research have failed miserably but my thirst for attention continues unabated, today I will once more shout at iPhone developers. That’s proven to work .
Herd Mentality
It’s not just that Apple *is* different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even *can* be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS.
Facebook is ruining Instagram
I always loved Instagram. It's been my favorite social network since I had a smartphone. I was happy when it was purchased from Facebook…
Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point?
The all-knowing sage Douglas Adams had this to say about technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can…
Mastodon Is Awesome
A hastily written guide for data science folks trying to navigate the fediverse.
Don't bet on the joys of pokies (2011)
When I was working in the Cairns Casino I’d often arrive on the floor to replace a guy who had been in the industry as long as casinos had b...
Death by Bureaucracy
I’ve been an anti-death penalty activist for 10 years. In this time, I’ve tried my best to observe and document the application of capital punishment in Singapore, and to support the families of death row inmates as they navigate the system. When people ask me about this
Model built by researchers suggests coronavirus outbreak began in November
The coronavirus epidemic started one month earlier than is commonly reported and has yet to be brought under control, a new disease-transmission model created by University of Toronto researchers suggests. Using open access data that are updated daily, the model replicates epidemiological scenarios and allows…
OpenAI's comment to the NTIA on open model weights
OpenAI’s comment to the NTIA on open model weights This comment was submitted by OpenAI in response to NTIA’s March 2024 Request for Information on Dual-Use Foundation Models with Widely Available Weights.
And then the music stopped
Remember way back to, oh, six months ago when champagne was popping and markets were roaring? Back when companies with no or few profits could premiere on the world stage to grand applause by merely converting a dollar into fifty cents? Those were the good times of boom, boom, pow. It’s am…
Dating: A Research Journal, Part 1 (2016)
My journey to finding love using science and data. Part 1 – how to own online dating.
What is Programmer Anarchy and does it have a future?
A developer I know recently told me that he wasn’t interested in any new opportunities in the short term because his team were about to adopt Fred George’s post-agile concept of Programmer Anarchy…
Abe’s New Word Order
The days when the typical foreigner in Japan was a tall Caucasian with a big nose are long gone
The software engineer’s guide to asserting dominance in the workplace
As a software engineer, changing jobs is a way of life. Every day, beautiful recruiters from top tech companies reach out to you on…
Sand trafficking in Latin America
Criminal mafias are making massive profits from the illegal extraction and sale of sand for construction purposes.
All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
Visions of Alt-Berlin in “Man in the High Castle” (2017)
An MIT urban planner looks at the alternative vision for a Berlin that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built.