Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 305 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
271

What Happened in 2014?

I’m not much for the rear view mirror. I like to look forward, not back. I guess that’s why I’m in the line of work I’m in. But I’m going to force myself to look back at 2014 and explain what just happened. Doing that will help me look forward (tomorrow?) and explain what is […]

287

Schadenfreude

"Magic the Gathering: Online Exchange" has magically gathered all your online bitcoins and exchanged them for ... something or other. More here . For once, do read the comments —it's hysterically funny, in a sad way, to watch the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

290

Engelbart's Violin (2012)

Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…

295

The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy

One of the most widely misused terms on the Net is "ad hominem". It is most often introduced into a discussion by certain delicate types, delicate of personality and mind, whenever their opponents resort to a bit of sarcasm . As soon as the suspicion of an insult appears, they summon the angels of ad hominem to smite…

296

Clean Coder Blog

Peter was showing the relationship between age and reputation on stack overflow. The correlation is unmistakable. The older the programmer, the better the reputation, by far. He also shows, in the following graph, that the reason for this correlation is that the older programmers answer far more questions than the…

298

Hou tu pranownse Inglish

There have been almost as many proposals for spelling reform as there are rewrites of Esperanto. (Tellingly, there has been precisely one success in each category-- Noah Webster and Ido-- and neither caught on universally.) Most of these proposals spend their energy fixing what isn't broken . For instance, they search…