2701
How prestige outlets get away with copypasta
On the anatomy of malpractice
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
2702
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
Here’s my story… About 20 years ago or so, I was at a Salvation Army auction one morning. They were selling of tons (literally) of junk they’d had donated to them over the last few year…
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TikTok’s Poison Pill
Just a few months ago, it seemed that the biggest social media news of the year would be Elon Musk’s flirtations with buying Twitter (see, ... Read more
2706
What the Hell Is Up with Dilbert?
The normally innocuous workplace comic strip is arguably trying to get itself canceled after three decades in syndication. But why?
2707
Famous HNers and their sites
Update: Here’s the link to the HN discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32291993
2708
Kitsault, Canada’s $50M 1980s ghost town
It sounds made up. In the wilderness of British Columbia, a two hour drive from any town with cell reception, sits a ghost town. Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50…
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Phrases in computing that might need retiring
The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the kind of software engineer who dives into the literature to see how ideas were…
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Nobody optimizes happiness
People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not?
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Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)
(This is another of my speculative pieces and nothing to do with Star Wars. This one is for an older trilogy.) Old Tom Bombadil. Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the…
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Alpha: A translation of Genesis 1
1. An advent: ancient archangels architect abstract astronomy and arid asteroids. 2. All asteroids are amorphous and absent; And a...
2716
A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page
Bruce Faulconer deserves better, but the system seems rigged against him
2717
Please save Hacker Lab
July 31 st 2022 has come and gone. Hacker Lab has closed but the community in Sacramento and the need for these kinds of inspiring and supportive makerspaces is still very much alive.
2718
An Economy of Overfed Middlemen
A venture capitalist called Equal Ventures just says it straight-up, we seek to invest in monopolization.
2719
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)
This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011.
2720
Cinema’s greatest scene: ‘Casablanca’ and ‘La Marseillaise’ (2015)
Casablanca is widely remembered as one of the greatest films of all time, coming in at #2 on the AFI’s top 100 list and similarly regarded by many other critics. You can quibble with its exac…
2721
Hispaniola's great divergence
Why are Haiti and the DR so different?
2722
Gnome Turns 25
Around the end of 2020, I looked at GNOME's commit history as a proxy for the project's overall health. A year and a half went by since then, and it's time for an update.
2723
For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry
For the first time in ~40 years (? – see below) New Mexico’s Rio Grande has “broken” – is no longer flowing – in what we call “the Albuquerque reach”…
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Negative incentives in academic research
In the first half of the XXth century, there were relatively few scientists, and these scientists were generally not lavishly funded. Yet it has been convincingly argued that these scientists were massively more productive. We face a major replication crisis where important results in fields such as psychology and…
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Plato's Argument Against Writing
The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions are going to be.
2727
Glassdoor not so anonymous
A judge has ruled in favour of releasing anonymous user details posted on Glassdoor to billion-dollar NZ toy company, Zuru
2728
What I learned trying to classify abortion access across the rich world
Rich countries are not monolithic. However, outside the US and a few microstates, they vary in a limited range.
2729
Crimes against transhumanity
(Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)
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$9.99/month
With subscriptions now the norm of the app world, I wanted to take a closer look & see how those little monthly microtransactions added up.