The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 April 2018. I’m not one to collect inspirational slogans, but here’s one I like: “Judge the value of what you have by what you had to giv…
Personal site of designer Frank Chimero
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
0xADADA produces code, essays, and films that explore…2018190 points88 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
On the commodification of attention, the abuses of unpaid microwork and strategies of resistance.
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously…
Yesterday I happened upon a Wired piece by Steven Levy that covers Ray Ozzie’s proposal for “CLEAR”. I’m quoted at the end of the piece (saying nothing much), so I knew the piece was coming. …
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
The American Community Survey collects data on the college majors of people who’ve graduated college. This excellent data has lots of untapped potential for family research, because it tells …
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
I loved this quote by Tristan Harris in the New York Magazine article The Internet Apologizes … “We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too
A group of high school friends has been playing an elaborate game of tag since reconnecting at a reunion almost 30 years ago. A few years ago, one of the player
Data collection and analysis by Hasan Al-Jamaly, Maximillian Siemers, Owen Shen, and Nicole Stone.
A Revealing Memo A couple weeks ago, BuzzFeed leaked a memo written by Facebook VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in the summer of 2016. It contained ... Read more
Ed Felton tweeted a few days ago: “Often hear that the reason today’s Internet is not more secure is that the early designers failed to imagine that security could ever matter. That is a myth…
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way.
