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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
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What happened to nerds?
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
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We must pace the frontier
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and…
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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
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EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors
Civil rights activist Dr. Patrick Breyer warns of an unprecedented "double-attack" on secure messaging ahead of critical Friday and Monday EU meetings. Ahead of a highly critical weekend for digital civil rights in Europe, former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding th
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What happened to the Snowden archive
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it…
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Most arguments are about ego, not ideas
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed…
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Men who stare at walls
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically: Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work. When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus. I’ve been trying it, and it’s a…
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ai;dr
For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?
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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d…
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A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review ) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process :
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AI makes you boring
This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN…
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It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
PlayStation announced that they will stop making discs. People are rightfully mad about this, but it's not actually about physical media. It's about owning your games.
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Dead Internet Theory
I had a wierd experience which made me realize that the internet is probably dead.
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A graph that should be front-page news
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is…
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Amazon accused of widespread scheme to inflate prices across the economy
California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged Amazon led a price-fixing conspiracy of online retailers to inflate prices across the entire economy. And he's demanding an immediate halt.
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I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases
How an expired nameserver let me take over e164.arpa zones for multiple territories, and why I probably should have checked my logs sooner.
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Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?
I generated 1,000+ SVGs across 7 frontier models to test whether AI labs are training on Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark.
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What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
tautology.town is a blog that contains tautologies.
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The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the …
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End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance
The controversial mass surveillance of private messages in Europe is coming to an end. After the European Parliament had already rejected the indiscriminate and blanket Chat Control by US tech companies on 13 March, conservative forces attempted a democratically highly questionable maneuver yesterda
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If you love a website, back it up
This story starts with a little tragedy. See, I’ve got these old webpages I love to go back and look on every now and then. There’s websites that h...
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I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program
I wrote to Flock’s privacy contact to opt out of their …
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Hold on to Your Hardware
A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.
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OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine
53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.
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Jev meets the Trolley Problem
I asked Jev and 13 other decision models the Trolley Problem.
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Attention Media ≠ Social Networks
When web-based social networks started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social networks. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine…