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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who…
Lisa Pollack at FT Alphaville mulls a question : “Why are we so good at creating complexity in finance?” The answer she comes up with is the “ Flynn Effect “, basically the idea that there is an uptrend in human intelligence. Finance, in this view, gets more complex over time because financiers get smart enough to…
The rise of powerful AI dialogue systems in recent months has precipitated debates about AI risks of all kinds, which hopefully will yield an acceleration of governance and regulatory frameworks.
We have hundreds of easter-egg logos (featuring our friendly mascot Dax Brown) that surface when you make certain queries on our search engine. Our subreddit is trying to catch ‘em all. They’ve certainly caught a lot, currently 504, but we keep adding more so it’s a moving target. The total as of this post is 594. I’m…
Meritocracy is a political philosophy that holds power should be vested in individuals according to merit. Advancement in such a system is based on perceived intellectual talent measured through examination and/or demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.
Apple has removed ICEBlock, a totally legal app that helps people track the movements of the masked snatch-squads who illegally terrorize brown people in America's cities, capitulating to a warrantless demand from Trump's DoJ boss Pam Bondi:
And the world is starting to notice
Greenwich, an experiment in collaborative curation
Founders at Work
It was called Xanadu . It was a grand, holistic vision: of documents that, once published, are available basically forever; of bidirectional links that could glue together not just documents, but parts thereof; of managing copyright and royalties. It was complex. And it never really came to fruition.
a tale about a young transgender intern
Our brains, evolved for tribal politics and campfire stories, are ill-equipped for the moral ambiguity of a system with no soul to save or damn.
(No joke. This is actually how I deal with a lawyers. This isn't just theory, this is my experience.) Have you ever seen the movie "Monsters Inc."? It's a cute animated Disney film about Big Scary Monsters. All day long they go through magical doors, each leading into a bedroom of a young child sleeping
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
Who takes over for Steve Jobs? 1 John Gruber recently posted his argument for thinking it will be COO Tim Cook. The biggest point in Cook’s favor is simple: “He’s already run the company while Jobs has been on leave.” That’s true, but it’s less meaningful than it sounds. But to understand why, you need to understand…
When Tim Berners Lee talks about how he designed the web, he uses an analogy from physics, describing his process as a quest to find “fundamental laws” which can generate a desired system:
Search+recs+open-ended text boxes
If you’re going to commit an illegal act, it’s best not to discuss it in e-mail. It’s also best to Google tech instructions rather than asking someone else to do it: One new detail from the indictment, however, points to just how unsophisticated Manafort seems to have been. Here’s the relevant passage from the…
I just got back from a wonderful trip to Rare Book School to deliver a talk in their 2015 lecture series. It was the last week of their summer season in Charlottesville, the week when the Descriptive Bibliography course (aka “boot camp”) was in full swing, and the weather was in all its hot, glorious humidity. I…
How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
"In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of [running] a business." -- George McGovern
