3991
The TikTok War
How TikTok exposed Facebook’s blindspot, thanks to its Chinese roots, and why those Chinese roots make TikTok a genuine concern.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
3992
The international student bait-and-switch
Come for the schools, be used as pawns for politics.
3993
Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
People in the bitcoin community often make fun of me as a nocoiner . That is, I don't have any bitcoins and am vocal about that fact. (Ne...
3994
3995
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3997
Just Too Efficient
On a Spring 2019 walk in Beijing I saw two street sweepers at a sunny corner. They were beat-up looking and grizzled but probably younger than me. They’d paused work to smoke and talk. One told a story; the other’s eyes widened and then he laughed so hard he had to bend over, leaning on his broom. I suspect their jobs…
3998
3999
If It’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture Is It?
Another long week in the all-stick, no-carrot revolution
4000
The stable marriage problem and modern dating
Attempting to model modern dating using the lessons learned from the stable marriage problem
4001
On the Closing of Living Computers: Museum+Labs
As you might have heard, Living Computers: Museum+Labs has shut down; its doors will remain closed for at least the next twelve to eighteen ...
4002
The GDPR as accidentally explained by people in the US
Bashing the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seems to have become one of American activists’ favourite hobbies in the tech field. Some criticism is entirely justified. But many claims that the GDPR is “counterproductive” or “misses the point” are based on misconceptions, rather than an…
4003
Pattern Matching, Racial Diversity and the Hypocrisy of Big Tech Media
It’s Time to Watch the Watchmen – The Diversity Report of TechCrunch, Recode, The Information, Business Insider and Protocol. Prelude I have been writing about Diversity in Tech for over a decade now – a long time. However, my self-published posts have never really got the audience it was targeted
4004
Analysis of all YouTube trending videos in US for 2019
This analysis was featured on: The Hustle newsletter (lead story), TechCrunch, Hacker News, The Growth Newsletter (issue #021), Social Blade, Data Science...
4005
The Slack Social Network
Slack lost to Microsoft head-to-head, but has smartly shifted to a horizontal strategy that the vertically-oriented Microsoft can’t match.
4006
Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
Privacy regulations such as the GDPR say that you need to seek permission from your website visitors before tracking them. Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be…
4007
4008
De-escalating social media conflict
Designing humility and forgiveness into social media products
4009
From context collapse to content collapse
When social media was taking shape fifteen-odd years ago, the concept of “context collapse” helped frame and explain the phenomenon. Young scholars like Danah Boyd and Michael Wesch, bu…
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4011
“It'll all be over by Christmas” (Part 2)
On April 16—gosh, it feels like an entire year ago—I made some predictions about where we were going. How do they hold up?
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4014
Web Dark Ages
Old Web features — frontend and UI patterns
4015
How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
4016
Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
In the last few years, you’ve likely seen a fair few comments about monopolies in the tech industry, and suggestions for breaking them up…
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4019
Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
4020
Break Up Google
It’s easy to say “Break up Big Tech companies!” Depending how politics unfold, the thing might become possible, but figuring out the details will be hard. I spent the last sixteen years of my life working for Big Tech and have educated opinions on the subject. Today: Why and how we should break up Google.