Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 100 posts.
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…
Say hi to Lucy.
The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read...
[Content note: hostility toward social justice, discussion of various prejudices] “Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through. First from him, now from you. Is tha…
I am home. My dog is happy to see me. The world is a good place and I am behind on work because American Airlines doesn't have proper power ...
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
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…
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook w…
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…
[Trigger warning for deliberately provoking horror about graduates’ real-world post-college prospects] [Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case] Ladies an…
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
Randy Olson charts out the IQ of students by their major's gender ratio and reveals a startling trend.
This tale begins and ends with a fellow named Bob Colesberry, who taught me as much as he could about filmmaking in the three or four years I was privileged to work with him. To those who knew Bob, it will provoke warm memories to say that he was not a language guy; he understood image, and story, and the delicate way…
Professor Steven J. Murdoch
Sexism in tech is real. One of the most insidious things happening in the debate is people claiming versions of “other industries may have problems with sexism, but our industry doesn’t.” Both men and women claim this, even though it keeps getting harder to do in the face of shocks like the Tinder texts. We know there…
Ghost Influence by Brian Swichkow2014343 points46 commentscited by 8Tech Industry & Business details
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
This is the mail archive of the gcc@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project .
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.
There's a problem with Silicon Valley and the subcultures that imitate it. It's a design bug woven into people's identities and sense of self-worth. Fixing it will be painful. Influential and otherwise very smart people will deny till their last breath that it even exists. But I believe it should be fixed before it…
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
Let's transform an old airport site into a Traditional City.
The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable sandbox in the interior were they didn't even bother to put in borders until fifteen years ago. That just…
