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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 700 posts.
After 25 years of working for, on and with the web, I am looking at the current state of it and I don’t like it. There is still a lot of beautiful, creative and amazing work out there, but on the whole, we lost an amazing opportunity. In its place we have a consumption machine that creates bubbles and assumes new…
I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes , forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes.
And what would a "good" WebMD look like?
Trends in medium, AI, and user interaction underpin Instagram’s response to TikTok, and will determine Meta’s long-term moat.
Teachers adapted to the calculator. They can certainly adapt to language models.
Tech companies working with AI are outsourcing data collection and training to academic/nonprofit research groups, shielding them from potential accountability and legal liability.
Online art communities have started banning AI-generated art, while others are facing public pressure from their own members to take a stand.
A climate change what-if Over a few beers... Growing up, I was obsessed with space. Like many tech workers, I consumed everything I could find about space and space travel. Young me was convinced we were on the verge of space travel, imagining I would live to see colonies
Part I of Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
A Non-Violent Weapon of Non-Cooperation Against Corruption Have you heard of the ZERO-RUPEE NOTE, yet? Many of you may wonder what the use of it is. Well, All Indians face Corruption in almost all…
On the digital void that is modern cinema
On the “phantom time hypothesis”, the bizarre conspiracy theory that 297 years of European history were entirely made up.
Tonight, I took the time actually to read DeepMind’s AlphaCode paper, and to work through the example contest problems provided, and understand how I would’ve solved those problems, and how A…
Your email provider owns your online identity by controlling your email address. You can’t port your email address to another provider as with phone numbers.
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too
Up until a few years ago, I used to feel good when sharing Twitter links. Compared to the other handful of websites that now make up our entire lives, it was the best option: Not a walled garden like Facebook or Instagram where you either don’t see any content at all or are bombarded with “sign up to continue” popups…
A peek behind the curtain into the struggles of the Chinese censorship office
It's not just the music biz—legacy media outlets everywhere are playing the same dangerous game. Here's how it will play out.
I was re-reading Nixon’s 1969 “silent majority” speech last week (Smithsonian ran a good breakdown in 2017), mostly because YouTube’s algorithm
American and European semi-trucks are very different. You don‘t have to be a truck enthusiast or have brilliant understanding of the mechanical part of these machines to see that semi-trucks used in USA and Europe look very different. But why? Why different ideas about what the truck should look like prevailed in…
We've been making compromises to the limits of fossil fuels for so long that we've forgotten they're compromises.
Just a few months ago, it seemed that the biggest social media news of the year would be Elon Musk’s flirtations with buying Twitter (see, ... Read more
Update (Dec. 6): I’m having a blast at the Workshop on Spacetime and Quantum Information at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I’m learning a huge amount from the talks and …
Edit: I feel compelled to make a small clarification; I'm not arguing for purging all files greater than X MiB (even though I still think LibGen has a non-negligible amount of junk and duplicate content but neither are easy to remove without significant manpower and LibGen lacks mechanisms to crowdsource the work)…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Hertz announced a $168 million settlement covering 364 claims against them, at an average of just over $460,000 per customer. There are perhaps a dozen more customers who are suing Hertz, that are not a part of the settlement. I have to think that in many of those cases the customers believe the egregiousness of their…
