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The world needs a non-profit search engine
Sometimes I forget why I’ve taken on this crazy, huge task. Why am I building a search engine ? Will it really be better than Google one day? Will people support it? Will people even use it?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 700 posts.
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Why is LinkedIn so cringe?
The answer is in its business model and algorithm.
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Russia to legalize software piracy
my show is canceled, business news reports
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A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term
Every infuriating thing on the web was once a successful experiment. Some smart person saw Normal site: 1% sign up for our newsletterThrow a huge modal offering 10% off first order: +100% sign ups …
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Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
Next week on Wednesday (May 11), the EU Commission will present an EU draft law on mandatory chat control to the public for the first time. Similar to Apple's highly controversial "SpyPhone" plans, the Commission wants to oblige all providers of email, chat and messaging services to search for susp
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Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Shaving is an example of how consumer products extract more money
Shaving is too expensive and is a demonstrative example of how most consumer products are designed to extract more money from you rather than to improve your life, or the world, or to be in any way remotely good.
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Web3 is expensive P2P
Web3 claims to be the only way to save us from commercial entities defining what we can see and what not. Yet, it does exactly this: It results in commercialized entities defining what we can see and what not. More on the blockchain ecosystem in this overview and especially in the simple, hum
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People don't work as much as they say
There is a persistent idea that people work 40 hours a week. They don't, and if you try to do this it will break you. Here are some more reasonable guidelines.
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Mendon, Missouri
Mendon, Missouri. Population 171. There’s really nothing here. The tiny town is located off Route 11, just south of Yellow Creek. You’re three hours west of Saint Louis, two hours […]
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Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear. Here's why that's dangerous.
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Why I'm in the Army Reserve – an explainer for my friends in tech
Outside my day job doing compiler research at Shopify, I lead the Cheshire Yeomanry , a squadron of British Army Reserve light cavalry . I spend about a hundred days a year of my spare-time in evenings, weekends, and holidays, training my Squadron.
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What is money, anyway?
Editor’s Note: This topic is now comprehensively covered in my book, Broken Money. Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something…
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What are you doing, WordPress.com?
Be sure to check out the update at the bottom. I recently wrote that I've stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind WordPress.com is running a good business…
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I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general
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Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)
When Calvin and Hobbes went out of print twenty years ago, I think most people assumed it would return at some point. I know I certainly did. Calvin and Hobbes was a formative part of my youth - the sly brilliant writing and stark black and white illustrations providing color to my sense of
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The coming tsunami of fakery
How the Dead Internet Theory is fast becoming reality thanks to zero, marginal-cost content generated at infinite scale
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I'm done with Google
My auntie is in hospital for christmas this year. It's been identified as flu, but it seriously affected her because she has a lot of heath problems inclu...
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Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
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Web3 is centralized
I've long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I…
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An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
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Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
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School vs. Wikipedia
Edit: Oh! Hello, there, HN . For context, we're talking about elementary school here. More importantly, I'm not arguing that students should get quick answers from encyclopedias instead of reading books and other primary sources. I'm arguing that Wikipedia is better than "a Google search," which is a position I will…
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That wild Ask a Manager story
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…
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Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
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The problem with Bitcoin miners
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
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We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021)
The title of this post is a quote from Edward O. Wilson’s book ‘Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge’. For example, if you search for scientific papers about “Entropy” …