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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.
To: John Isley, Executive Vice President, Higher Education & CEO Pearson Technology Group
Earlier this week, xkcd posted a fantastic comic about the apocalypse happening and the dead rising to walk the earth. In the comic, mathematicians scribbled frantically and raced to Paul Erdos’ grave to get him to sign a document that is presumably co-authorship on a paper. (For the uninitiated, read about the Erdos…
In the past, gods and demons allowed us to talk about phenomena that we didn’t fully understand. During the Enlightenment, we tried to kill them and explain everything in reductionist scientific terms. But it feels to me like we’ve come full circle. We’re back to using oversimplified metaphors to wrap our minds around…
HN Discussion
Everything I read about the AI industry leads me to think there will be an AI crash. Consider the following: Unsustainable Capital Expenses. It’s hard to imagine there can ever be enough revenue to…
The New York Times is special.
Trying to make web applications federated is a popular effort. Examples include things like the “fediverse”, as well as various other efforts, like attempts to make distributed software forges, and so on. However, all of these efforts suffer from a problem which is fundamental in building federated applications built…
No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it’s never a good idea to piss off the refs.
A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today.
I popped round to an NHS dentist a few months ago - and they stuck my head on one of these contraptions. The Kodak 8000C takes a panoramic X-ray, giving a superior view of your teeth. Nifty. The dentist showed me where my wisdom teeth were and I was impressed with how high resolution the image was. Afterwards, I asked…
Final Installment of the Misinformation Trifecta
Does cola contain a drug to prevent you from throwing up from the sugar? And is Mexican Coke somehow better than American Coke?
01 Intro One of the favorite activities of tech analysts, VCs and similar Twitter armchair experts is to predict what the next big technology platform might be. The usual suspects that come up in these conversations are VR/AR, crypto, smart speakers and similar IoT devices. A new contestant th
In 2006 at around 4 am, a man appears at the door of a security booth in Downtown Los Angeles. He slowly opens the door, being careful not to be noticed. He grabs the key attached to a small crowbar h
This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, what I am doing or who I am hanging out with.
The first journey we made with the gold picture frame sledge was to a small glacier not far from the base known as 'Sunnyside Glacier'. Me and Fergal Buckley took photographs of several toys with...
Flattr improves customer privacy protections by automatically deleting collected data when its no longer needed for its core service.
A lengthy digression into the life of a saint
Eyes Wide Shut is the last work of legendary movie director Stanley Kubrick, and like many of his films it contains layers of meaning not easily deciphered or understood on first viewing. Released in 1999 to mixed responses, Eyes Wide Shut has since garnered considerable interest and has come to be
