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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
If you've ever tried to write a computer program, you'll know the dread of a syntax error. An errant space and your code won't compile. Miss a semi-colon and the world collapses. Don't close your brackets and watch how the computer recoils in distress. The modern web isn't like that. You can make your HTML as…
Can’t bring yourself to slaughter a nearby village, or a long-time associate?
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.
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the...
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
The story of why I stopped taking photos
So, there are new MacBooks and many people are unhappy . Tl;dr: Apple thinks thin-and-light is more important than well-equipped-and-powerful.
A Reckoning for Social Psychology
I received a review copy of Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers back in the 1980s, but never read it. I did, though, keep it, because it lo...
It’s time to reformulate the principles guiding my work. [Revised definition of complexity in response to misunderstandings]
Fanatics has rolled up power in all areas of sports merchandising. And now it's coming for baseball, football, and basketball trading cards.
We're making scientists and ghost-hunters kiss
I’m working on a list of corporate jargon alternatives. There are already plenty of resources telling you what you should be saying instead, such as “soon” for “ASAP” or “waiting” for “holding pattern” and the like. But they usually lack that flair of ostentation we have come to be accustomed to. Therefore, I had the…
Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of Mars (Notes from talk on September 22, 2016, at the Mars Society Conference. ...
The history of technology is full of innovators who got their start creating with their hands. Steve Jobs cites a calligraphy class at Reed
The references to Gutenberg reminds me of a discussion in Simon Winchester's fascinating book "The Man Who Loved China". There the author points out that the first printed book occurred in China about 500 years before Gutenberg. The question posed by Winchester's "Man" (Joseph Needham) was why, with such a lead…
Does everybody get to coin one maxim in their lives? If so, here’s mine: Everything gets worse. Let’s say you’re shopping at the grocery, when you notice a new food product. It competes directly with
What if, rather than banning advertising outright, we taxed it instead?
Cycling Lessons Learned From Amsterdam That No One Talks About This post originally appears on Spacing Vancouver. By Darren Proulx and Samuel Baron I recently had the honour of visiting Amsterdam. …
