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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
You may have heard about Bandersnatch , an interactive film released on Netflix as part of the Black Mirror series. I’ve heard about it when it was released, but didn’t get around to watch it until recently, and I was surprised at how deep and thorough the implementation is. The film consists of:
Social media companies have moderation SNAFUs on a near daily basis. Inevitably, the public and the tech press reacts with incredulity, “This company has so much money. How can they still be so bad…
Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web:
I was first introduced to Austrian economics during my senior year in high school, when I first read and enjoyed the writings of Mises and Rothbard. The summer before I began my undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, I was able to attend the 1989 Mises Institute summer seminar at Stanford, where I met Murray Rothbard and…
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. Submitter comments are in italics. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review of LongForm and Instapaper here .
What did Oppenheimer mean when he famously said, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds"? A foray into the Bhagavad-Gita.
Introduction to Interslavic — Vvod v medžuslovjansky jeazy — Ввод в меджусловјански језык
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
So, here’s a story. On 15 April 2019, when the roofspace over the crossing of Paris Cathedral caught fire, I was in a pub in east London having a burger. My initial reaction was not one of an…
“Boeing 737 Max: What went wrong?” (BBC) contains a plot showing the angle of attack data being fed to Boeing’s MCAS software. Less than one minute into the […]
I read something depressing last Monday, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I wonder if he would have said so if his native language wasn’t German. Whether one agrees with it or not (I personally would do so partially!), there’s some modern neuroscience that backs important portions…
In a beautiful, rollicking piece last month for Aeon Magazine, web developer James Somers ponders the question, Are coders worth it?
Keybase’s iOS client has received a backdoor. It seems that Stellar, the extremely well-funded and well-marketed cryptocurrency, has struck a deal with Keybase…
I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. Wha…
I recently listened to a discussion of knowledge work in the browser. Along the way people imagined idealized workflows and the tools that could enable them. This result felt familiar from concept videos since forever (such as this old Mozilla concept video ):
The other day someone pointed me to this article by James Kaufman and Vlad Glǎveanu in a psychology journal which begins:
By Michael Nielsen, November 21, 2019
0: Introduction This is from businessstudent.com: Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. T…
Investigation of Talebs claims about IQ using real data.
Stop supporting data harvesting business models by picking alternative services and ad channels. Also, please don’t share this on Facebook.
