Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 71 posts.
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
By Jakub Janovsky , Naalsio , Aloha , Dan , Kemal , and Alexander Black This list only in...
The sender's ISP, rather than the receiver's ISP, is the always-online post office from which the receiver picks up the message.
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". We've previously discussed Marc Andreessen's quote that tech hiring can't be inefficient here and here…
The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content - generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of full
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022cited by 16History & Retro Computing details
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions are going to be.
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
This page is intended to be a humorous parody of Hacker News . It is not in any way affiliated with Hacker News. The page's theme and layout are based on the original site. The usernames (with two exceptions) are intended to be fictitious.
[Translations: Japanese] The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in … Continue reading →
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that…
The Black Chamber was founded by the U.S. Army and the U.S. State Department in 1919. The Secretary of State terminated funding in 1929, famously writing that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
Payment processors hostile to freedom of expression hate me for this one weird trick!!
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
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…
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information produ...
Scott’s foreword One week ago, E. O. Wilson—the legendary naturalist and conservationist, and man who was universally acknowledged to know more about ants than anyone else in human hist…
Editor’s Note: This topic is now comprehensively covered in my book, Broken Money. Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something…
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general
People who work get bored when they don't work. People who don't work never get bored.
A design pattern to reduce centralized control and change incentives in social networks.
Many people believe some transactions are final. The reality is a bit more complicated, and involves technical, social, and legal factors.
How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.
There is a terrifying and highly effective “method” that criminal hackers are now using to harvest sensitive customer data from Internet service providers, phone companies and social media firms. It involves compromising email accounts and websites tied to police departments and government agencies, and then sending…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022429 points605 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine an…
