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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried
And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists
NBC drops the ball on distribution
Goodreads is full of trolls, spam, and harassment campaigns. They probably like it that way.
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
Back to: Brief hiatus | Forward to: Tanks! Why tank stories make great tech myths
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
The wonder of the web is that it is not subject to the whims of chaotic corporate management.
[These events took place roughly between 5:30 and 6:30 AM, November 13th in Terminal 2 of the San Diego International Airport. I'm writing t...
The challenge of dealing with fake accounts that spread disinformation is probably one of the greatest challenges facing the large social media companies. Most methods used to detect fake Twitter a…
Chris McCormick - News
The American Medical Association is not a charitable organization. The American Medical Association is not an educational organization. The American Medical Association is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation, designed from the ground up to enrich its executives and serve its own bureaucratic interests…
An analysis and infographic of 10,000 porn stars and adult films, revealing what the average adult performer looks like and does on film.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lurch into dusty darkness as their Manhattan-bound 4 or 5 train leaves Brooklyn’s Franklin Avenue station. As the blurred fluorescence of the station…
Warning: According to Facebook you are not allowed to read this post, so beware.
I wake up to a gorgeous morning in Ibb. This time I’ve slept through the morning call to prayer and the sun is well up in the sky. Out the window there’s a view of a regular city against a backdrop of green mountains, with some construction equipment in the near foreground, and it takes my groggy mind a minute to…
It’s hardly insightful to suggest that the last few years have substantially changed the day to day experience of a knowledge worker. Nearly overnight even the most remote skeptical leadership teams were forced to embrace flexible work practices like working from home. But now, despite COVID-19 being a
Several years ago I had the chance to lead two seminars with a group of high-performing Chinese high school seniors. Each seminar had between 20-35 kids; each of these students was a graduating sen…
Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996. Here’s what we had then, in chronological order: LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, SQL, O…
Let's address the mammoth in the room: the fediverse , the network of mastodon servers, is very inefficient.
In "Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation," a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:
This a rant, written at midnight, after battling software errors. Set your profanity filters accordingly. I despair over the state of software engineering - specifically, stability. We seem to have lost the understanding that computers are there to do the hard work for us. And I don't think we ever believed in a…
To solve Bitcoin’s scalability challenge, many so-called layer 2 protocols have been proposed. All of these protocols operate on the same, relatively simple, principle:
We reviewed 22 ML conference submissions this summer. Fifteen had fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, or clear LLM slop, so we complain about that a bit, and release the paper references audit we now run.
