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What Is Amazon?
What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years. I have sold to and bought from Amazon in about as many ways as one person can; I built an auto parts brand …
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Russiagate is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
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US Army applying new areas of math
Many times on this blog I've argued that the difference between pure and applied math is motivation. As my graduate advisor used to say, “Applied mathematics is not a subject classification. It's an attitude.” Traditionally there was general agreement regarding what is pure math and what is applied. Number theory and…
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The principle of charity: Criticize the best interpretation of an argument
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
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Programmer Migration Patterns
I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how programmers seem to move from one to another. There's a more common...
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What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
David shares how the new age of information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics. Read here.
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Reasons Not to Use Apple (2018)
Apple reportedly had objections to what Jon Stewart said in his video program — it canceled the show after he had criticized China, and something the article describes as "AI". (It could be that what he criticized was actually large language models, which may be an important issue but are not "intelligence" .)
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Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
This will be short, ranty and to the point: these warnings are getting ridiculous: I know, tell you something you don't know! The whole ugly issue reared its head again on the weekend courtesy of the story in this tweet: > I’m not sure if this makes it better
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The Web We Broke
I read something depressing last Monday, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
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Graying Out
For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
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On the death of my family's dairy farm
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on.
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Where Warren’s Wrong
Senator Warren’s proposal about how to regulate tech is wrong about history, the source of tech giant’s power, and the fundamental nature of technology itself. That doesn’t mean t…
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Quotes from 1992
I was recently recommended to read the book [Accidental Empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) by [Robert X. Cringely](...
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Less than a month to go before Google breaks links to Google+ Picasa albums
Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and […]
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Chickens Are Bullies – Can Their Behavior Teach Us About Our Own?
When I was growing up in a suburb of Austin, Texas, the neighbor across the street had a small flock of backyard hens that were a…
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Why American Construction Costs Are So High
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
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Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing (2017)
Autistic burnout is a state of physical and mental fatigue, heightened stress, and diminished capacity to manage life skills, sensory input, and/or social interactions, which comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs.
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Status as a Service
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
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Protest against the EU radio lockdown
We are facing a EU regulation which may make it impossible to install a custom piece of software on most radio decives like WiFi routers, smartphones and embedded devices. You can now give feedback on …
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Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
We live in an era that devalues conformity, while simultaneously preserving it in many interesting ways. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Divergent views produce conflict, however, and disagreement, argument, and debate define our current moment. If we merely disagreed on matters of taste - our favorite color…
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Wage Stagnation
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can’t guarantee I’ve understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Som…
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Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences
Recently, OpenAI came out with a new language model that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2. It’s disturbingly good. You can see some examples (cherry-picked, by their own admissio…
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Twitter Thread Compiler Apps and Copyright Ethics
Twitter threads are a pain to read! So let's just steal them, right? Umm... Nope, probably wrong. I'm going to say very wrong. Think about it.
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We’re Reading Fahrenheit 451 Wrong (2018)
I was reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a day or two ago while reading Ian Bogost on Apple’s Airpods. Bogost examined Airpods’ potential long term social consequences. …
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RIP Culture War Thread
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can’t comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several yea…