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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 598 posts.
One of the things that frustrates me with having a local music library is the tedium of tagging. While there are tools (like beets or MusicBrainz Picard) to make it easier, I feel there are fundamental issues with the design… Continue reading →
Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,...
I have a confession to make: I am a complete Bruce Schneier fanboy. I have been following the cryptographer, Harvard lecturer and privacy specialist for many years, and was delighted to meet him face-to-face at last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, where he gave a keynote (registration required) on how to…
In the culture wars, hypersensitivity and accusations of ‘hate’ risk leading us into an Orwellian future
Amazon is very proud of its "flywheel": at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the "everything…
I had the pleasure of stumbling upon the work of Michael Crow, Arizona State University’s president, earlier this year, and I so enjoyed his thoughts on knowledge production that I immediately wondered how his philosophy would translate to ASU as an organization. Turns out, President Crow was many steps ahead of me…
The Internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can’t be monetized and thus don’t have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. Services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries - software without which the net and…
What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can…
If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people.[David Okrent]
Special thanks to Morgan Beller, Juan Benet, Eli Dourado, Karl Floersch, Sriram Krishnan, Nate Soares, Jaan Tallinn, Vincent Weisser, Balvi volunteers and others for feedback and review.
Fanatics has rolled up power in all areas of sports merchandising. And now it's coming for baseball, football, and basketball trading cards.
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
This is how bubbles collapse: the "vital few" 4% sell at whatever the market will bear, pushing prices down, and the 64% awaken to the rapidly narrowing window for locking in bubble capital gains. Here's how we can tell if a speculative bubble is a bubble : everyone says it isn't a bubble --the market has reached a…
AI is finally useful for business, and everyone is likely underestimating its impact. But unless AI is open-source and truly owned by the end users the future for everyone but the software providers looks grim.
Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning.
Connection and intimacy are still possible on the internet today.
Or "Spiderman Is My Boyfriend"
It’s believed that many of us spend seven hours or more in front of screens each day. In 2011, researcher Emmanuel Stamatakis, found that “…even those who exercise can’t overcome the detrimental ef…
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used…
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
