Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 137 posts.
In another week the GDPR , or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
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 .
Openly sharing your work brings more attention to it, which is good, right? The answer, for me though, is often “it’s complicated.” This is what happened when I went to visit a giant tech company, in hopes for collaboration, but later found that they tried to patent some of my research instead!
In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad LawToday was a dark day for the Internet.The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing...
You’ve probably heard about GDPR. The new European data protection regulation that applies practically to everyone. Especially if you are working in a big company, it’s most likely that there’sContinue reading
How Colleges Make More Money Than God By Giving It Away
Translator and proofreader’s note: There are large parts of this document that don’t parse well either from Chinese or from Naomi’s written…
[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your goin…
Does Google show you different search results based on your personal info, even when signed out and in so-called "incognito" mode? We ran a study to find out.
In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no…
On June 20th, board members of the „Zwiebelfreunde“ association in multiple German cities had their homes searched under the dubious pretence that they were „witnesses“ while their computers and...
Some recent press stories (1, 2) have discussed archived blog posts of a prominent journalist, Joy Ann Reid, in the Wayback Machine and her claims that some of these posts were “manipulated” by an “unknown, external party”. This past December, Reid's lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog…
In the early days of mobile, we built a set of APIs that enabled other companies to recreate the Facebook experience. This is very different from the public APIs used by third-party developers.
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
This blog post is a personal account of sexism, harassment, and racism that I and some anonymous members of the computer architecture community have experienced. We are sharing these experiences in…
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of
Amazon’s face surveillance technology is the target of growing opposition nationwide, and today, there are 28 more causes for concern. In a test the ACLU recently conducted of the facial recognition tool, called “Rekognition,” the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people…
Update July 10th: Last week Monday, prosecution stated that they will keep our things for further analysis, even after explicitly confirming to journalists that they are aware that our only connection to Riseup is the collection of donations. This includes items belonging to our partners, and other third parties like…
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
[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 →
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…
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
On May 16th, I found a vulnerability in the LocationSmart website which allowed anyone, with no prior authentication or consent, to obtain the realtime location of any cellphone in the US to within…
Explaining more about the information we get from other websites and apps; how we use the data they send to us; and the controls you have.
