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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered"…
You’ve changed almost everything. So why do the same problems keep coming back? Explore the rules, responses, and results with UPGRD®.
After maintaining a total stance of public silence for months, I recently publicly announced my unexpected divorce on Instagram. I shared a picture of the divorce cake that my friends got for me, and shared a brief essay I had drafted the day before about the news. I had to edit it down slightly from my original draft…
And your precious first principles math proves it
Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (yes yes, seems silly I know, you can read part 1 and part 2 but […]
The gavel has fallen; the cup has been stomped; pick your metaphor. Microsoft has succeeded in its almost-two-year quest to gobble up Activision. The peculiar side effect in my corner of the world is that Microsoft now owns the dusty remains ...
Ok so, sex toys! Admit it. You've thought about it. 😉But it seems so complex! You can't use a sex toy straight from the printer because the materials and nozzles aren't body safe, and even if they were, the layer lines are a breeding ground for bacteria. So traditionally you'd have to print a blank and smooth it (with…
How psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is being used as a weapon against children
I often write about odd monetary phenomena on this blog. Here's a new contender, Yemen's dual banknote system. Yemen uses the Yemeni ri...
Okay, folks. This is new territory for me. I'm stepping into the world of.... t h i n k p i e c e s...
You and me, we’re bad at a lot of things. But email isn’t one of those things, no matter how much it seems like it.
Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core foc
Of all the forms of tech debt, decoherence is the worst. It compounds exponentially with a system's rate of change, and AI is now producing it faster than ever, leading us deeper and deeper into the abyss...
I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who…
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
Hey All, This year I ran for Florida House of Representatives District 49 (Orlando). I lost, but I got 31% of the vote and I only spent $3000. My opponent got 69% of the vote and spent $100,000. I've been asked about this on Reddit, so I'm going to make a detailed post about how
As you might have heard, Living Computers: Museum+Labs has shut down; its doors will remain closed for at least the next twelve to eighteen ...
AI plays well at complex strategy games with uncertainty and incomplete information.
My last days at Uber in San Francisco were filled with disrespect, condescending managers, and sexism.
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it…
P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that…
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same…
