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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people (2017)
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
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Linux – The beginning of the end?
Important article slash rant about the recent story involving Linus Torvalds and his behavior in the Linux kernel development circles, the subsequent apology, the fallout, and the disturbing implications and ramifications of the whole affair on the long-term survival of Linux as a whole
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A Day in the Life of Americans
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.
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Briar and Bramble: A Vision for Decentralized Infrastructure
What if we could build secure systems that didn't depend on central servers or even Internet access to let people collaborate? What would a system like this mean for political organizing, disaster relief, or even civic infrastructure? The Briar app and the Bramble framework are an attempt to find out.
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The European Union versus the Internet
The EU is back to regulating tech companies, and getting the Internet wrong in the process. That, though, helps illuminate an approach that could work.
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How to Name a Baby (2013)
Meet the Name Fad. In 30 years, the names Natalie, Chelsea, Samantha, and Lindsay will sound how Nancy, Cheryl, Susan, and Linda do today. And in 60 years, the names Ethan, Cody, Brandon, and Matthew will be Earl, Chester, Bernard, and Melvin.
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Bullshit Job Notes
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not…
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Big Debt Crises
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares his unique template for how debt crises work.
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The Effectiveness of Publicly Shaming Bad Security
Here's how it normally plays out: It all begins when a company pops up online and makes some sort of ludicrous statement related to their security posture, often as part of a discussion on a public social media platform such as Twitter. Shortly thereafter, the masses descend on said
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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
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Who Wrote the Anti-Trump New York Times Op-Ed? Using Tidytext
Like a lot of people, I was intrigued by “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, an anonymous New York Times op-ed written by a “senior official in the Trump administration”. And like many data scientists, I was curious about what role text mining could play.
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Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system
This post will probably only make sense to those deeply involved in Mastodon and the fediverse. So if that’s not your thing, or you’re not interested in issues…
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Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?
Epistemic Status: Resident Expert I’m a little late on this, which was an old promise to Robin Hanson (not that he asked for it). I was motivated to deal with this again by the launch of Augu…
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Bullshit Jobs
A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor’s note for back pain or something. Usually it’s a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work …
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Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility
Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into. I’m going to pick up where I left off there. For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me). In red, you have the positions that a company...
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What Was the Microsoft Network?
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
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The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…
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Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
Privacy, Power, & Protection In The Cyber Century2018148 points108 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
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The Approval Economy
Why every purchase is a performance “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.” — Thomas Cooley About a month ago, I published what has become my mo…
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Dear Ad Networks
In 1 week, I plan to benchmark all your advertisment delivery systems from IP address block 184.20/16.
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On Loneliness and Solitude
I discovered the existence of Lars Svendsen thanks to a forum discussion about - of all things - the modern apparel industry. One of the comments mentioned in passing his "Fashion: A Philosophy" and the idea of someone writing a philosophical analysis of Fashion intrigued me… so I checked out the book on Amazon. In…
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Regarding the Most Recent Amazon Mechanical Turk Data Contamination
Suggested Citation: Bai, H. (2018) Evidence that A Large Amount of Low Quality Responses on MTurk Can Be Detected with Repeated GPS Coordinates. Retrieved from: https://www.maxhuibai.com/blog/evidence-that-responses-from-repeating-gps-are-random