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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN…
UPDATE : Revolut has refunded me, I will update the post with more details soon.
Garbage in garbage out
PlayStation announced that they will stop making discs. People are rightfully mad about this, but it's not actually about physical media. It's about owning your games.
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…
How We Lost Communication to Entertainment par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
I have edited and expanded this in a newer post, you should read that instead: School is Not Enough
Today is January 11th. Some of you know what this day means to me — it marks the 3 year anniversary of when I was in New York and got a…
I bought a Toshiba laptop about 9 months ago, it is still under warranty. It does not turn on at all. Warranty card states that laptop is covered in the United States, US territories, Latin America and the Caribbean. This is the only reason I used to buy Toshiba. Sent the laptop to Toshiba in Guatemala and they refuse…
I stumbled across a Reddit bot posting emotional rants about how bots are ruining Reddit; just to sell AI-generated books through affiliate links. A perfectly dystopian grift for the dead internet.
https://gofund.me/8950f458
Am I now committing civil disobedience... just by keeping my personal literary website up as is?
A public service announcement
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
I had a wierd experience which made me realize that the internet is probably dead.
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is…
The governments of Australia, Germany, the UK and the US are destroying your privacy. Some people don't see the problem...
When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was "A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?" My 7-year old brain popped. WTAF is a nickel? Or a dime for that matter? We don't have those coins in my country! We don't spend in ¢…
I used Apple Configurator to turn my iPhone into a dumb phone. I can only access the apps and websites I want to use, and it’s feeling great!
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
Oh goodness, what fun twitter was in the early days, a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest. It was glorious ‘to turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping.’ We frolicked and water-bombed and sometimes, in the moonlight, skinny-dipped.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged Amazon led a price-fixing conspiracy of online retailers to inflate prices across the entire economy. And he's demanding an immediate halt.
I was listening to the Tim Ferriss Show podcast episode #532 with Sheila Heen (Harvard Negotiation Project, co-author of Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most) and a specific story she told during the conversation really resonated with me and I have been thinking alot about it since I heard it…
A detailed explanation of why I keep saying that advertising is a cancer on modern society.
