481
I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,213 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
482
Neil Gaiman: Why defend freedom of icky speech?
This is a bit long. Apologies. I'd meant to talk about other things, but I started writing a reply this morning to the letter that follows...
483
Bad Dye Job
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
484
The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
485
A Timeline of CIA Atrocities (1993)
A timeline of CIA atrocities.
486
Banks, QE, and Money-Printing
Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…
487
Aaron Swartz on illness and depression
I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping up with Bubble City. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks lying in bed and drinking fluids. (With occasional breaks to play Rock Band, much to the annoyance of my neighbors.) Once again, I’ve been sick — this time, with four different illnesses.
488
Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
489
No Copyright Intended
On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order. A couple things struck me about this video. First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting…
490
Memrefuting
(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time) A few people have aske…
491
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
492
Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
493
Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety
This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.
494
Should AI Be Open?
I. H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons:They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the l…
495
What is the small web? (2020)
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce…
496
Stack Overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
497
Before You Get Too Excited About That GitHub Study
Another day, another study purporting to find that Tech Is Sexist. Since it’s showing up here, you probably already guessed how this is going to end. Most of this analysis is not original to …
498
Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception
There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.
499
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
500
Standing Up For Android
Shifty Jelly’s counterargument to some of my Android opinions, which provides a concrete data point showing that money can be made on Android, concludes with this:
501
502
Jean-Paul Sartre, Signing and Significance
Dr Craig Steven Wright: interdisciplinary researcher, founder and research leader. Qualifications, programme-building and research across economics, law, computing and digital scarcity.
503
504
They Used To Last 50 Years
Now refrigerators last 8–10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades? I’ve bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950’s that still work perfectly fine. I’ve come across washers and dryers from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were still working…
505
Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool
It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any…
506
Victory Lap for Ask Patents
There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent fr…
507
Open Social
The protocol is the API.
508
Why Bother with What Three Words?
I'll be wording this post carefully as What 3 Words (W3W) have a tenacious PR team and, probably, have a lot more lawyers than I do. W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me. A brief primer. The world is a sphere. We can reference any point on the surface…
509
One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020
If you aren't familar, Hacktoberfest is an annual event that occurs every October. It is held by Digital Ocean and encourages developers to submit Pull…
510
Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web
Open Source Freelancer