1981
How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?
In the culture wars, hypersensitivity and accusations of ‘hate’ risk leading us into an Orwellian future
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
1982
Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? (2003)
Try to spot who liked hacking away at corpses rather than computers
1983
The end of tweeted articles
Elon Musk, X and the end of tweeted articles
1984
1985
The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
What if you could counterfeit so much money that it stopped being illegal?
1986
Credit card debt collection
Credit card debt is the waste stream of consumer finance. The debt collection industry ends up being sordid, for complex structural and microeconomic reasons.
1987
1988
The end of the subscription era is coming
You’re overpaying for your porn (and journalism)
1989
Profound Beliefs
This post previously appeared in EIX. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opi…
1990
The thinking path
Novel news; a review for the NYT.
1991
I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to…
1992
On the 10th anniversary of the Snowden revelations
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
1993
Man, Myth and Magic
Collect the set! I don’t really need a digital copy of Man, Myth and Magic—I’ve been the fortunate owner for many years of the bound set of original magazines you see above—but I imagin…
1994
When tech says ‘no’
The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or would be) disasters. So which is it? Well, there are three ways that people say ‘NO!’
1995
The Airbnb Bubble Popping Will Pop the Housing Bubble
This is how bubbles collapse: the "vital few" 4% sell at whatever the market will bear, pushing prices down, and the 64% awaken to the rapidly narrowing window for locking in bubble capital gains. Here's how we can tell if a speculative bubble is a bubble : everyone says it isn't a bubble --the market has reached a…
1996
Plastic Money
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the balance tracking and authorization decisions happen within a financial institution that…
1997
Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid
1998
Microsoft Edge is starting to annoy me big time
Short article slash rant discussing the Got it! button in a prompt for personalized Web experience in Microsoft Edge, covering user experience interruption, bad design, aggressive marketing, implicit decisions, other annoyances, and more
1999
2000
2001
AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties advocacy group, recently published a good article entitled “ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.” 1 It argues that providers within the internet “stack” should refrain from censoring traffic according to their own values. That…
2002
Mastodon Is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media – In a Good Way
A comment on a Hacker News thread inspired me to contemplate why Mastodon is everything we loved about social media before…
2003
My Caste
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
2004
The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself
The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself, and it's mostly not Biden's doing.
2005
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
2006
2007
A note to young folks: download the things you love
Many years ago, my favorite podcast was The Totally Rad Show. It was a fun video podcast where the hosts reviewed movies, games, TV shows, and other general nerd stuff. The hosts were Jeff Cannata (who last year I called the podcasting GOAT), Dan Trachtenberg (who went on to direct
2008
When your classmates threaten you with felony charges
A few weeks ago, I was part of a talk at DEF CON 31 called The Hackers, The Lawyers, and the Defense Fund. I was asked to share my experience receiving a legal…
2009
2010
Lie still in bed
One of the most impactful pieces of advice I ever got was just to lie still in bed.