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Response to DHH
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
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
722
Me on Covid-19 contact tracing apps
I was quoted in BuzzFeed: “My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,” Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does…
723
Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons)
Excellent blog post by Valerie Aurora about sexual harassment at the DefCon hackers conference. Aside from the fact that this is utterly reprehensible behavior by the perpetrators involved, this is a real problem for our community. The response of “this is just what hacker culture is, and changing it will destroy…
724
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
725
Privacy Protects Bothersome People (2013)
We need to support privacy, not for those of us who have "nothing to hide", but for bothersome people like investigative journalists and activists, without which our democracy would crumble
726
Yoshua Bengio: How Rogue AIs May Arise
The rise of powerful AI dialogue systems in recent months has precipitated debates about AI risks of all kinds, which hopefully will yield an acceleration of governance and regulatory frameworks.
727
John Gruber: I'll Tell You What's Fair
What’s goofy is the idea that Google would do this — to aggressively change Android from a BlackBerry/Windows Mobile competitor into an iPhone competitor — and that anyone would expect Apple not to retaliate, to instead just sit there and take it and allow all other aspects of their previous buddy-buddy corporate…
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Boeing 737 MAX crash and the rejection of ridiculous data
“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 […]
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Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)
In a beautiful, rollicking piece last month for Aeon Magazine, web developer James Somers ponders the question, Are coders worth it?
731
Trust but Verify
It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that…
732
Inflation, part 1: On shelter futures
A deep-dive
733
Inflation is differential and restructuring (2021)
When it comes to inflation, economists get it wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere differential.
734
My Resignation from Freenode
As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much…
735
A Statistical Analysis of All Hacker News Submissions
After downloading all 1,265,114 Hacker News submissions from the official Hacker News API, I gathered a few interesting statistics which show the true impact of Hacker News.
736
Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
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Malthusianisms
(See also: Umeshisms, Anthropicisms) Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,0…
739
Why We Sleep: A Tale of Institutional Failure
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
740
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
741
Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?
What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?
742
The online sports gambling experiment
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
743
On “White Fragility”
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
744
Stay Gold, America
We are at an unprecedented point in American history.
745
The Shirky Principle (2010)
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
746
Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
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