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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...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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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.
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Why rails buckle in Britain
Why don’t rails get hot in Europe? The truth is they do.
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'Zero trust’ security is a poor choice of words
Consider the user's perspective when naming a security initiative
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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
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Learning The Elite Class
my experience at fancy parties
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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…
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10% of the top million sites are dead
Top 1 million domains? More like the top 1 million lies
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52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted
YouTube is a platform and a community which live off of reuploads. With the privating of old unlisted videos, let's re-examine the relationship between YouTube and reuploading.
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We must protect our ability to transact privately online (2019)
Without cryptocurrency, a cashless society is a surveillance society
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Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes
A textbook currency crisis, triggered by a bunch of policy mistakes.
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The future of innovation has patent-free standards
Supposedly “open“ standards – including those ratified by ISO, CEN and ETSI – can’t be implemented without going cap-in-hand to the world’s largest companies to buy a license.
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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 …
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Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
A design pattern to reduce centralized control and change incentives in social networks.
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If the news is fake, imagine history
Access to the Network has changed our perception of the present and the perception of the past.
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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.
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IETF Draft: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards
Despite being designed and operated as a decentralized network-of-networks, the Internet is continuously subjected to forces that encourage centralization. This document offers a definition of centralization, explains why it is undesirable, identifies different types of it, catalogues limitations of common approaches…
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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…
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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?
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Congratulations: We now have opinions on your open source contributions
More thoughts on supply chain and package managers.
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Linux Sucks 2022
"This time it's personal."
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Books That Changed How I Hear Music
But none of them are music books
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I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
Blog for DoltHub, a website hosting databases made with Dolt, an open-source version-controlled SQL database with Git-like semantics.
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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.
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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 […]