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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
It is clear that ketamine at a sufficient dose & frequency can and does kill neurons through NMDA-driven excitotoxicity. However, what does a sufficient dose & frequency mean? There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. While it does increase neurogenesis in the only two places in the…
Ivan Illich is doing to computers what he did to education (De-Schooling Society, 1971), to energy (Energy and Equity, 1974), to medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1975), and to sex roles (Vernacular Gender, 1983). Each time it has been radical analysis that changes our perception of what is really going on. Each time, and…
Like so many past ephemera finds I’ve shared here, I bought these midcentury North American restaurant placemats at Brimfield Flea this July from a vendor who had around 500 in a big plastic tub. I bought 25 for $75 (a steal!) but I did have to talk myself out of asking how much it would be for the whole box. Most of…
running on jurassic park's fumes for over 30 years
The US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined. China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. This column uses the recently released 2023 update…
These are the two most-streamed children's shows. Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.
Last month, I met with Eric, a fearless PM at a medium size startup who recently got into vibe coding with Gemini.
We, people and civil society organisations from Europe and around the world, call on the European Commission to act now to break up the powerful Big Tech
They told us elections were rigged. Then they cloned stolen voting software. Then they bought the voting machines.
For a very long time, it appeared obvious to outside observers of the time flow that Skynet would never win the war, and never annihilate humanity.
I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time ( momo ), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the…
In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an …
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
Within five days of ChatGPT’s release in 2022, the artificial intelligence chatbot gained more than a million users. Today, more than half of all adults
Colin Campbell explains how Redwood drains every drop of capacity from used batteries before they are recycled.
A personal recap of 2025 and a year of a new style of engineering.
Our research shows that even the latest "reasoning" models are vulnerable
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to. Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability …
How can we design better platforms?
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
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One of the signal achievements of computing is data compression 1 : we take in data, make it smaller while retaining all information (“lossless” compression), transmit it, and then decompress it back to the original at the other end.
griff Table of Contents Author's Note What Exactly is the Problem? Human Capital is Limited Burnout Burnout Burnout What AI Slop Looks Like The CV...
Every advancement in model intelligence for coding has encouraged us to rethink how development should be done. The Integrated Development Environment (IDE)…
In 2024, EFF wrote our initial blog about what could go wrong when police let AI write police reports. Since then, the technology has proliferated at a disturbing rate. Why? The most popular generative AI tool for writing police reports is Axon’s Draft One, and Axon also happens to be the largest...
