1411
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1412
Kenya and "the decline of the greatest coffee" (2021)
During one of his “yes or no” Instagram Q&As, Scott Rao lamented the declining quality of Kenyan coffees over the last three years—a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by buyers across Europe, the US, and Australia. He kicked a different question over to me about whether cultivar or microclimate or process has the greatest…
1413
You must read at least one book to ride
The first is going to sound bad in a culture where engineers are encouraged to apologize for existing while it is totally acceptable for a grifter that can't code to insist that they're a "thought leader". It is that, in my immediate professional environment, I am consistently acknowledged to be one of the best…
1414
The deterioration of Google
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
1415
Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation
On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland's government announced a new and very strange policy. All Finns were r...
1416
Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
A data scientist’s perspective
1417
Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).
1418
Why I have resigned from the Royal Society
The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert H...
1419
Those correction notices, in full
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.
1420
Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
1421
The tech utopia fantasy is over
i talk about how the idea of a humanity-saving tech revolution from the usual tech suspects is dead (for me).
1422
The 'Return to Office' Lies
i vent about return to office bullshittery.
1423
Against the Dark Forest
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.
1424
How decentralized is Bluesky really?
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
1425
A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)
Can urban intersections be designed in such a way that motor traffic, cycling and walking flow smoothly and that the potential conflicts of these very different types of traffic crossing each other…
1426
The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor
1427
How good are American roads?
We’re in an era where US infrastructure is getting a lot of attention.
1428
1429
Maybe Bluesky has "won"
November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I disagree with. I figure that’s a good enough excuse to write more about this weird-assed social network.
1430
Defensive Communication (1961)
I provide this HTML version of a historical article because it was not easily available but was central to my article: Reagle, J. (2010). “Be nice”: Wikipedia norms for supportive communication. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (Special Issue on Web Science) , 16(1), 161–180…
1431
The online sports gambling experiment
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
1432
1433
Notes on Guyana
Over the summer, I visited Guyana (pronounced Guy-on-uh), mostly in and around the capital of Georgetown. I had plans to see far more of the country but they didn’t come to fruition. Sometimes whil…
1434
Google banned me from Google Voice
After 15 years, Google banned me from Google Voice . This post is a summary of what happened, with the hope that it might help someone in the future who runs into the same situation. At the end , I have some thoughts about the latent danger of being banned from Google at any time with no notice.
1435
XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging
Posts about SmolWeb, Gemini protocol and LowTech
1436
Learning not to trust the All-In podcast
Gross incompetence or purposeful deception?
1437
New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
1438
Ticketmaster’s attempt to game arbitration services fails
In an effort to curb mass arbitration, Ticketmaster sought to switch arbitration service providers to New Era ADR, including for past ticket purchases. New Era incorporated some defense-favorable provisions to its mass arbitration provision. The Ninth Circuit holds those provisions...
1439
Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
Albertsons uses land use restrictions in Mammoth, CA to stop competition so it can be the only store in town.
1440
Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
A counterintuitive conclusion