Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 1,047 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
281

Lets talk about blockchains

A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…

284

The web starts on page four

After 25 years of working for, on and with the web, I am looking at the current state of it and I don’t like it. There is still a lot of beautiful, creative and amazing work out there, but on the whole, we lost an amazing opportunity. In its place we have a consumption machine that creates bubbles and assumes new…

285

Privacy is ok

I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes , forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes.