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Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest
A proposal to end exclusionary zoning would allow for 100,000 more homes in Berkeley's neighborhoods.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 450 posts.
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RIP botsin.space
There's no easy way to put it, so here goes -- after a lot of consideration, I've made the hard (frankly, painful) decision to shut down botsin.space. TLDR: here's the plan:
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Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
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Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark
The Danish DPA issues an injunction in the Chromebook case
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Do U.S. ports need more automation?
On October 1st, 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), primarily dockworkers on East and Gulf Coast ports, went on strike after failing to agree contract terms with USMX, an alliance of port operators and employers.
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MKBHDs for Everything
Marques Brownlee has tremendous power because he can go direct to consumers; that is possible in media, and AI will make it possible everywhere.
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All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second
I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth ...
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De-googling, so far
Over the past few years, I have tried to gradually reduce or eliminate my use of Google products and services. It has been difficult to ditch Google’s products in some categories, and in some others, it has been nigh impossible. Here, I list the services I have tried to find alternatives for, discuss the ease (or lack…
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Understanding how bureaucracy develops
understanding how actions taken with the best of intentions can put your organization in a straightjacket
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A Lego model of financial capitalism
Unboxing the dark arts of finance
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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
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Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm
Searching Google Scholar for "certainly, here is" turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT - sections that start with "Certainly, …
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On the new Dutch intelligence and security law
13th of June UPDATE: The Dutch government has failed to hire and house the promised new 10 oversight staff. Yet, the new law will be enacted July 1st, passing oversight to people that don’t exist. I surely enjoyed living under the rule of law, but it appears it was a passing thing. “The Netherlands hosts some of the…
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Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?
I recently built a website that breaks down the cost of a UK electricity bill. It's interactive, and I'd recommend visiting it before reading this post. Check it out here: electricitybills.uk Here are three interesting things about the data. #1: The wholesale power cost is only one third of
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LLMs aren't "trained on the internet" anymore
A path to continued model improvement.
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I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription
A personal blog of diverse opinions.
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The Tale of Daniel
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about the strangest markets on the internet. This year I went down a different rabbit hole. Daniel has been a top 5 baby name twice since 2000. There…
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Cars suck, man
What better way to start off the new year than with a little rant.
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Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
Want to learn more? Learn To Count to a Billion in Korean in 15 Minutes ! Or Learn to Read Russian in 15 Minutes !
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100% User-Supported
If you want to build principled software, avoid becoming VCware. Stay user-supported. It is now possible for tiny teams to build principled software that mil...
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Jerk
If you’d like, you can listen to an audio version of this page. It includes all the contextually relevant bits of music, and a few ad libs not included in the text. But it doesn’t include the links and images, naturally.
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Are We Watching the Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual
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Findaway's new terms of service are unacceptable
When Findaway Voices first appeared, it made it comparatively easy for independent authors to do audiobooks. Audio was still hard, mind you, but it was possible.
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Our muscles will atrophy as we climb the Kardashev Scale
If you like this, you might also like my Instagram channel Nerd on Bars @nerdonbars where I calculate the power output of various athletes and myself.
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