New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved
We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is a hollow thing, trailing off, as it does, into oblivion. I love Aaron. I loved Aaron. There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it…
Aaron Swartz's Legacy
It's really only in the past year or so that I had grown aware of him at all; one hears a lot of names over the course of following the industry and the Internet scene, and I'd naturally heard of him. But it was only recently that I had come to realize that I kept hearing about him in matters that were of particular…
A Chat With Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz , now in his early twenties, rose to internet fame as technology whiz kid a couple of years ago, working on such things as W3C standards or the Creative Commons. He was also blogger behind the very successful Google Weblog. Via instant messenger, I interviewed him on Reddit, activism, Google and more.
Aaron Swartz on illness and depression
I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping up with Bubble City. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks lying in bed and drinking fluids. (With occasional breaks to play Rock Band, much to the annoyance of my neighbors.) Once again, I’ve been sick — this time, with four different illnesses.
Aaron Swartz: What Happens in The Dark Knight
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
[Translations: Japanese] New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. I watched the movie The Hobbit. Twice. First I saw it in its “standard” mode. A … Continue reading →
Behind the scenes of the Pirate Bay trial
Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a...
Who wrote the 'Death Note' script?
Internal, external, stylometric evidence point to live-action leak of 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 Hollywood script being real.
How blind people use Instagram [video]
Tommy Edison shows how he uses Instagram on the iPhone. So we’ll just take a picture of the crew. Why I’m holding the thing up to my face like I can look throug
Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format
I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready. The resulting ...
A world without power
The 14th of August, 2003 was an interesting day in many ways. I’d just taken the family down to Toronto to spend a day there and pick up our newly minted passports at the Dutch embassy. We had some fun in the city seeing the sights, visited Niagara Falls and were on the way back on a sunny August thursday afternoon…
What happens when you are the doctor on the airplane?
Recently he posted a note to Facebook that he had been summoned into action onboard a flight. He was the doctor who responded when they asked over the speaker, "Is there a doctor in the house?" I couldn't let that story go untold, so I sent him a bunch of questions, which he was kind enough to answer.
Expedia: Bad for the Traveler, Bad for the Hotel
There is a lot of talk in the news these days about the difficulties facing small business owners around the world. Nowhere are these difficulties felt as deeply as in the travel industry. The rapi…
Astrology For Businesses
A few years ago, my work sent me on a training course. It involved the usual things, trust exercises, team bonding, and personality profiles. I filled in a few forms, answered some questions, and the very professional looking lady marked up my paper and said, "I see that you're a Scorpio. That means you're focused…