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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
This is deranged, each nation’s boomers and reactionaries attempting to outdo the others: “Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom” … th…
Avoided emissions seem like a (well-intentioned?) shell game
Civil Rights, Criminal Justice and Homeland Security
Most of the time, we worry far too much about tail risk. We worry about terrorist attacks and necrotizing fasciitis, but not much about heart disease or car crashes. But in 2011, 17 US citizens...
In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons. It’s possible that you think that unauthorised use of copyright…
1. Statistics / numerical analysis / data science is a lot harder than you, the reader of this blog, might think.
I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help. I think we will soon have enough testing capacity, so now I’d like...
Warning: towards the end of this post are references to suicide, which may be distressing to some readers. Discretion is advised.
(And everyone knows it)
The American plane, a 22 year old Boeing 777-200 (registration N754AN) crossed in front of the Delta jet that was in its takeoff roll. Air traffic control saw this happening and at almost the last possible moment called out to Delta to abort takeoff, out of fear the two planes would collide ("Shit! Delta 1943 cancel…
The purpose of this article is to share my story in hopes of connecting to the right people at Facebook who can help me save my businesses…
The Bitcoin community has changed greatly over the years; from technophiles that could explain a Merkle tree in their sleep, to speculators driven by the desire for a quick profit & blockchain startups seeking billion dollar valuations led by people who don’t even know what a Merkle tree is. As the years have gone on…
There's a problem with Silicon Valley and the subcultures that imitate it. It's a design bug woven into people's identities and sense of self-worth. Fixing it will be painful. Influential and otherwise very smart people will deny till their last breath that it even exists. But I believe it should be fixed before it…
Reader question: “Why do all old statues have such small penises?” The reader who sent me this felt that it was a question that was maybe too silly for my blog, but – firstly – there ar…
ChatGPT and LLMs amplify both insight and illusion. They are not knowledge engines, but confidence engines shaping how we think and learn.
Several months ago, reddit shook with the news that longtime subreddit /r/jailbait -- dedicated to, well, you can probably guess …
Published February 2020 There is currently a short squeeze affecting most of the global economy, slowing its growth. This has been the case well before the impacts from the trade war and the coronavirus. A short squeeze occurs when something that is heavily shorted goes on to rise sharply in price for one reason or […]
I use goodreads a lot because I like to read books and want to find more books to read. This morning I was reading a thread on hackernews on Sarah Manavis’s ...
A fictitious Sean Byrne ended up on a U.S. government restricted-party list. Sixteen years later, Apple, Nasdaq and others have mistaken me for him.
Vodafone UK has taken it on themselves to make the world better by marking this website (daniel.haxx.se) "adult content". I suppose in order to protect the children. It was first reported to me on May 2, with this screenshot from a Vodafone customer: And later followed up with some more details from another user in ……
With subscriptions now the norm of the app world, I wanted to take a closer look & see how those little monthly microtransactions added up.
A Central Bank Digital Currency would enable a totalitarian nightmare
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
In the simplistic account of what many call "surveillance capitalism," the original sin was swapping our attention for free content, summed up in the pithy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
I was reading Hacker News a few weeks ago and I stumbled on a story: Amit Gupta needs you. It turns out that Amit is the thoroughly likeable founder of Photojojo. Amit had the double misfortune to: a) have acute leukemia, and b) be South Asian. The problem with the first one is obvious. The problem with the second one…
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and …
