The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Three months ago, I announced that I was writing a book on why security exists in human societies. This is basically the book’s thesis statement: All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective—and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives—as…
Last year I shared how Twitter was moving more and more towards a closed, less-standards oriented model of sharing content as they upgraded their design to bring more people to the Twitter.com website. At that time, they removed the prominent RSS icons and made it only possible to access an RSS feed for an individual…
From time to time, we receive government requests for information, usually market information and occasionally subpoenas. Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and reque…
In So Long and Thank for All The Fish, the elegiac fourth book of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, Douglas Adams gives us this conversation between Arthur, a very ordinary Earth…
I take illegal drugs for inspiration Daily Telegraph, Saturday May 21st 2005, pp 17-18 (Note: This version is very slightly different from the published, edited, version) © Sue Blackmore 2005 Every year, like a social drinker who wants to prove to herself that she’s not an alcoholic, I give up cannabis for a month. It…
Update: Tumblr called me, apologized, and restored my account. More details below.
In the near term, companies making iPhone and iPad competitors are never going to beat Apple at their own game. Apple has supply chain advantages, a massive num
A voting system that sidesteps Arrow's theorem entirely. The scare quotes around
From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
Whoa. Thanks for all the attention and feedback, everybody! In case you're curious: I ended up emailing the letter to RMS and got a reply earlier today. I am skeptical of advice from people who disagree with what I stand for. --Dr Richard Stallman Overall, commenters seem to have had fairly positive things to say, but…
Dear Dr. Stallman, Thank you for coming to Penn and giving a talk on A Free Digital Society; it was an honor meeting you. You mentioned that what you expected of us was to help the Free Software Foundation however we could; I'd like to take you up on that and offer both yourself and the FSF the following advice: Stop…
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
The scene was a post-seminar dinner at a homely Vietnamese joint. We had just listened to Jacquet speak at the University of Chicago. A soft-spoken grandfather-like figure, he enjoyed the nearly un…
Bill III's Blog -
I was taking an improv class, and the instructor gave us a game to play before getting on stage, so that we can turn off our over-rationalizing minds and get into the flow. The game was called Status , and it went like this:
The creators of the Flip resisted the urge to gunk it up with complexity. It was a wonderful device and getting better. Then Cisco killed it the day before a new one was supposed to ship.
Eric Roberts just sent out a note of concern to the ACM Education Council, and he kindly allowed me to share it here as a guest post. When I read his note, I thought about my May 2009 CACM column …
One thing you may not know about me is that I am a writer. More specifically, I'm a freelance writer. This means I can have several clients at once, work from home in my underwear, and set my own hours. It is basically like being a prostitute, but with less stringent hygiene requirements.
Publishing is central to Academia, but its publishing system is outclassed by what Open Source software developers have in GitHub
Slightly surprisingly, I got a reply, in which he suggested that I submit the link to Hacker News[4]. I'd never heard of Hacker News, but had a look, thought it interesting, and submitted the link.
