The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
This morning, I spent an hour in a closed room with six members of Congress: Rep. Lofgren, Rep. Sensenbrenner, Rep. Bobby Scott, Rep. Goodlatte, Rep. Mike Thompson, and Rep. Amash. No staffers, no public: just them. Lofgren had asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn’t…
Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programs continue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassified additional information, and the President’s Review Group has just released its report and recommendations. With all this going on, it’s easy to become…
Writing and Stuff from Isaac Z. Schlueter
Say hi to Lucy.
In Mindstorms I made the claim that children can learn to program and that learning to program can affect the way they learn everything else. I had in mind something like the process of re-empowerment of probability: the ability to program would allow a student to learn and use powerful forms of proba- bilistic ideas…
It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that…
We’re at an inflection point in the practice of constructing software. Our tools are good, our server developers are happy, but when it comes to building client-side software, we really don’t know where we’re going or how to get there.
This is perhaps one of the most striking passages I have read for a while. It describes the modern world with startling accuracy. In our fear of an increasingly authoritarian rule, we have allowed …
I rarely re-blog, but this one deserves being spread far and wide. Timeline of the Destruction of 100 Year Old Franklin County, NC Records Please read the whole post included above – but the …
This is a story about how the VPS provider Digital Ocean required me to either delete a blog post or make it anonymous by removing any reference to the person I was writing about. If I refused to d…
Why Google's monopoly on search is a growing problem, from conflicts of interest to SEO manipulation, and why we desperately need a real competitor.
I bought a Toshiba laptop about 9 months ago, it is still under warranty. It does not turn on at all. Warranty card states that laptop is covered in the United States, US territories, Latin America and the Caribbean. This is the only reason I used to buy Toshiba. Sent the laptop to Toshiba in Guatemala and they refuse…
Professor Steven J. Murdoch
Just before black friday I was surfing some major retailers sites and on a whim wanted to see how they were using jav...
I am currently too upset to be able to do a good job of writing this article concisely and effectively, so please be patient and read the whole rambling thing. Note also: I’m not upset about the existence of one such conference – the real problem are the publish-or-perish rules in colleges/universities that are…
I feel badly for Paul Graham because he's being made out to be something I am sure he is not. But the brouhaha that he unleashed about women founders, women coders, and women hackers is a good thing because we ought to be having a broader conversation about these issues. Paul asks "God knows what […]
It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites, or civi...
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
I was going to write a rant. But I'm tired. Plus it's better to be nice in situations like these. And I can't take on any more of the Inte...
