Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,107 posts.
Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr) You can read what you probably came here for at archive.org But if you’ll allow me first: Bringing people together is my life’s work. The text that was originally …
We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology . To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the…
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
New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?
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…
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story:
Many people have asked about how this email openness actually works. Is it really the case all our mail is copied to a list? If so, how do we avoid drowning in email?
Updated August 4, 2019: Added link to “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded ‘Army’ To Terrorize Young War Dissidents” The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal governme…
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…
Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we're on the same page (if you think that I should be using a different word for the concept, feel free to mentally…
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
Journalism, in the ideal world, is supposed to inform the citizenry of facts important to their well being. Modern journalism seems to involve issuing press releases from the oligarchical reptiles …
Here is how to make a fortune writing software: Pick a large and established software market e.g. back-up, anti-virus or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Write a new product for tha…
On March 20th, Cloudflare received our first patent infringement claim: Blackbird Tech LLC v. Cloudflare, Inc. Today we’re filing our Answer to that claim in a federal court in Delaware.
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'More hens, less income!' So said the United Egg Producers' economist Donald Bell in 1994. The industry has gotten more consolidated ever since. And avian flu is just the latest excuse to hike prices.
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
This is a story about how the VPS provider Digital Ocean required me to either delete a blog post or make it anonymous by removing any reference to the person I was writing about. If I refused to d…
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…
[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]
I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…
