Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,108 posts.
Google has recently announced their intention to remove the H.264 video codec from its Chrome browser. This decision has been smeared as an evil campaign for controlling video on the web, akin to not-invented-here syndrome. It’s also been lauded as the push that the web needs to remain open and free. Mostly, it’s been…
Introduction [DISCLAIMER: The original author is a layperson without medical/scientific credentials and this post represents a best-effort attempt to synthesize relevant research and unpack the policy implications of the “lockdown” approach as compared with the proposed alternative.] [Note: See the very last section…
A real bummer — Apple removed Scratch from the iTunes store, so it’s no longer available for iPad, iPhone, or iTouch. Why? Discussion on the Scratch forums suggests that it’s be…
(With Mark Spitznagel)
Third-party Facebook apps gather Facebook data about the people who use them. While Facebook struggles to contain these exposures, insecure third-party data practices & misconfigured cloud systems continue to leak Facebook data to the internet. See how UpGuard discovered and secured two such cases.
In their own words, we see that Snap Inc’s design choices expose millions of kids to harm
On Wednesday afternoon I received a thoughtful email from Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller regarding Ninjawords and the App Store, and I think it bodes well.
noyb filed a complaint against Mozilla for quietly enabling a supposed “privacy feature” (called Privacy Preserving Attribution) in its Firefox browser which tracks user behaviour on websites.
UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Cathy Koshland issued a statement today in response to federal findings on the accessibility of online course content and lectures.
Why bother? Because you want to change the world!
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
“If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?”
I wanted to see how daily patterns emerge at the individual level and how a person’s entire day plays out. So I simulated 1,000 of them.
It's unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer. At best I can congratulate someone for quickly and simply solving a problem on top of the shit that they are given. The only software that I like is one that I can easily understand and solves my problems. The amount of complexity I'm willing to tolerate is…
The global pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness in America. This report from Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explores who is lonely, the many causes of loneliness, and ways to alleviate it.
On Aug. 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches—and the passengers refused to fly with them on board. The men were questioned for…
COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.
Tokyo has rightly been getting some plaudits for housebuilding of late, and this post brings together some stats that illustrate just how impressive its record is. First, some definitions and conte…
Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work
A groundbreaking study from Just Facts has found that the poorest 20% of Americas consume more goods and services than the averages for most of the world�s richest nations.
Tech is entering a period of inequality where the big winners lift the sector as a whole even as smaller companies suffer. The best example is Facebook, Google, and digital advertising.
Even if you can’t stop Flock’s use entirely, you can still help protect civil liberties in your community.
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
