2731
New numbers on music consumption
And it's not just the dominance of old songs—the whole creative culture is losing its ability to innovate. But why?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
2732
The high price we pay for social media
Sitting exams is unpleasant at the best of times, but my daughter believes she has extra cause to complain. Two of her A-level papers are scheduled for the same time, so she must take a break betwe…
2733
We could have universal Covid vaccines soon
Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way
2734
Scratch is a big deal
While none of us were paying attention, Scratch has transformed from a programming language for kids to a massive online community of self-guided, student-pr...
2735
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I
A recurring theme of this newsletter is the failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry.
2736
'Zero trust’ security is a poor choice of words
Consider the user's perspective when naming a security initiative
2737
Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)
When Calvin and Hobbes went out of print twenty years ago, I think most people assumed it would return at some point. I know I certainly did. Calvin and Hobbes was a formative part of my youth - the sly brilliant writing and stark black and white illustrations providing color to my sense of
2738
Learning The Elite Class
my experience at fancy parties
2739
The case against CS master’s degrees
Around half of all software engineers are self-taught, One way to approximate this number is via the Stack Overflow developer survey . Another rough approximation comes from the fact that over the last decade, typically only 40-60K students graduated each year with a CS major from a US university, whereas the total…
2740
2741
10% of the top million sites are dead
Top 1 million domains? More like the top 1 million lies
2742
2743
Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes
A textbook currency crisis, triggered by a bunch of policy mistakes.
2744
A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term
Every infuriating thing on the web was once a successful experiment. Some smart person saw Normal site: 1% sign up for our newsletterThrow a huge modal offering 10% off first order: +100% sign ups …
2745
Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
A design pattern to reduce centralized control and change incentives in social networks.
2746
If the news is fake, imagine history
Access to the Network has changed our perception of the present and the perception of the past.
2747
Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill
L ast month I wrote a post about the UK’s “world-leading” vision for age-gating the open web. It got a bit of attention . That post, sadly, encompassed only one aspect of your compliance obligations under the Online Safety Bill . In this post, I’m going to tell you about the rest.
2748
Why is there no semantic ontology of sentiment in academic citations?
About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF…
2749
The world needs a non-profit search engine
Sometimes I forget why I’ve taken on this crazy, huge task. Why am I building a search engine ? Will it really be better than Google one day? Will people support it? Will people even use it?
2750
Congratulations: We now have opinions on your open source contributions
More thoughts on supply chain and package managers.
2751
Linux Sucks 2022
"This time it's personal."
2752
Books That Changed How I Hear Music
But none of them are music books
2753
2754
Did the early medieval era ever take place?
On the “phantom time hypothesis”, the bizarre conspiracy theory that 297 years of European history were entirely made up.
2755
Mendon, Missouri
Mendon, Missouri. Population 171. There’s really nothing here. The tiny town is located off Route 11, just south of Yellow Creek. You’re three hours west of Saint Louis, two hours […]
2756
2757
What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams
2758
Even when you do succeed, sometimes it pays to try again
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
2759
Steelmanning: Discover the truth by helping your opponent
Tackle the steelmanning challenge, a three-step method to win arguments by helping your opponent. Its only downside: Nobody will ever take it.
2760
America needs supply-side reform
It's can't just be an excuse — we need to improve our policies