The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post...
Shaving is too expensive and is a demonstrative example of how most consumer products are designed to extract more money from you rather than to improve your life, or the world, or to be in any way remotely good.
Well at first that looks weird. It pings and all so I jump to incognito mode, and…
This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
There are a lot of ludicrously terrible government laws, regulations and policies across all the domains of life.
In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientific anarchism event in Woodside, California. Scientific anarchism, a term borrowed from the controversial philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, concerns the way science is performed in the laboratory and the way that ideas are generated, refuted, and incorporated into…
Some years back I applied to join IBM's grad scheme, there was a peculiar stage to the process I've not seen elsewhere. It was during the onsite day, where a batch of 20 or so applicants were put through various tests in an IBM office. They called it the "group test"; around 8 of us were led to a room and asked to…
Matthew Butterick
Why would I pay $36 for a pair of underwear?
Little tips for walking a lot
Vodafone UK has taken it on themselves to make the world better by marking this website (daniel.haxx.se) "adult content". I suppose in order to protect the children. It was first reported to me on May 2, with this screenshot from a Vodafone customer: And later followed up with some more details from another user in ……
Now this is pretty weird: I just got blocked by Twitter for a tweet that I did not make:
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
This is a song about culture wars, futurism, apocalypta, and gun math. Click to read Handwaving Freakoutery, by BJ Campbell, a Substack publication.
This is the first post in a series where I explore how love hurts and why.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
In November 2020, SFWA came forward with a stunning accusation: Disney had told the beloved writer Alan Dean Foster (author of the original, bestselling Star Wars novelization) that they would not ever pay him the royalties he was owed.
How to arrive at a number you can trust
Jonathan Haidt thinks so. I’m not so sure.
A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…
I’ve been concerned about the excesses of the blockchain industry and their spread into all parts of society for some time now. Here I’ve summarized my thoughts regarding the subject.
Thank you to Ondřej Čertík, Oscar Benjamin, Travis Oliphant, and Pamela Chestek for reviewing this blog post. Any errors in the post are my own. On April 19, 2022, for approximately 11.5 hours, the do
Measuring the extent of self-reviewing at the New York Review of Books from 1963-2022
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!! Energy Saving Trust@EnergySvgTrustA quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets, laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them…
Optimism requires believing in an unknown, unproven future
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
Unless Maybe You are Adele
