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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
Now refrigerators last 8–10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades? I’ve bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950’s that still work perfectly fine. I’ve come across washers and dryers from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were still working…
We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things.
This morning while perusing the settings of a bunch of apps on my iPhone, I discovered a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default: Enhanced Visual Search. (I manually disabled it before taking the screenshot below.)
It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any…
San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 , yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost…
AI has changed the experience of being an engineer, starving my Thinker side while satisfying the Builder ...
We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
Make Search Great Again (or just kill it)
An overview of Reddit's adversarial and seemingly counter-productive changes.
First, to dispense with the philosophical argument: Yes, this is my life, and yes, I'm free to use — or waste — it however I please; but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if this is how my time could be best spent. That applies doubly if the question is not merely about the choices I made but is rather…
An analysis of which stories are removed from the front page of Hacker News due to moderator intervention.
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information produ...
It is possible to restrict Google AMP from your life both as a web user and as a web developer. Here’s how you can fight back against Google AMP.
IFTTT will maintain Pinboard support through at least the end of 2016. While this date is not specified in their full statement , I have confirmed it with the CEO and am pleased to announce it here.
Chicago argued that answering a FOIA request with a database query means creating a new record. Matt Chapman sued, I wound up on the stand explaining SQL, and now there's a bill to fix it.
My day was completely ruined yesterday when I stumbled upon a fun fact that absolutely obliterated my mind. I saw this tweet yesterday that said that not everyone has an internal monologue in their…
In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory , David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely…
Xiaomi browsers collect not merely your browsing history but also searches, downloads, YouTube videos watched and much more.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably have seen the same massive surge I’ve seen in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to pretty much every problem out there, in software testing, in software development, and in life in general.
On May 16th, I found a vulnerability in the LocationSmart website which allowed anyone, with no prior authentication or consent, to obtain the realtime location of any cellphone in the US to within…
