The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing…
AccuWeather issued a statement regarding the controversy over their app sending location-identifying information to a monetization firm. It’s a veritable mountain of horseshit
Tomorrow I head for “ Sci Foo ” at the Googleplex. I proposed a discussion session there, “Are We Becoming Less Cooperative? If So, Why?” and I’d like to use today’s blog to help…
Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable Remember Mastodon? In April 2017, there was a wave of excitement about Mastodon, a federated social network begun in October 2016 by Eugen …
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Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the “new” P≠NP proof: I’d again bet $200,000 that the paper won’t stand, except that the last time I tried that, it d…
Annual note to self – most of the world exists outside the tech bubble. —– We have a summer home in New England in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato fa…
Why your outdated brain is making you unhappy and how to hack it.
(I wrote this in reference to this memo and the ensuing uproar) First off, his argument had some flaws. For example, even if he was correct about personality differences between men and women being…
The role of the modern librarian, and other things
Does anyone have any questions about NAFTA for my PSYCHIC PIG?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
I. An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an e…
I’ve just seen two talks back to back. The first was about AI, where the now compulsory first question came from the audience ‘Why are the...
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
A startup called Airmule has recently made a big splash by offering $99 flights to Beijing. Obviously there’s a catch. The catch in this case is that you have to give up one of your checked bags (they appear to book you on carriers that allow two checked bags), and your other checked bag is a courier shipment. So…
You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are…
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
Brief background
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
1 Aug, 2017 Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube (Google/Alphabet, Inc) have formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and Amber Rudd is asking them to quietly drop end-to-end encryption from their products. You should not believe a single word any of those companies tells you about end-to-end…
