4231
Human attention has become a commodity
Fake news. Misinformation. Mental health crises. Election meddling. Extremism. Partisanship. Eating Disorders. Body Dysmorphia. Vulnerability porn.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
4232
A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)
Don't try this at home.
4233
We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do
Sentience is a neuroscience question, not a machine learning one.
4234
How Trustpilot Extorts Businesses
Trustpilot promises to be “free and open” — in reality, they are the exact opposite, holding companies at ransom, and outright violating…
4235
Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
4236
Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus
In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: Copied JSON to 📋⧉ JSON"hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun"…
4237
Computers are an oppressive technology
This may seem a strange heading for someone whose career is in computers, yet I feel that this article has been a lifetime in the making. It is the product of intuitive observations and things that have stood out to me, even as a child, who even then could sense the sinister side of the most banal of technologies.
4238
It matters how you raise your kids
To parents besieged by expert advice, a new scientific idea offers relief: it’s no big deal how you raise your children....
4239
Inflation, part 1: On shelter futures
A deep-dive
4240
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The Great Decentralization? Geographic shifts and where tech talent is moving
Distributed work may hold the key to creating forward thinking metropolises.
4242
In defense of cryptocurrency
Last week a group of technologists, including Bruce Schneier, sent a letter to Congress outlining their concerns around cryptocurrency and urging Congress to regulate the space. Now let me be the f…
4243
Why is American administrative capacity in decline?
Some speculative hypotheses
4244
The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
Teach For America's blog—real change is within reach. Explore stories of our people, tools for making change, leadership development, and career resources.
4245
Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)
Follow the Johns Hopkins Medicine newsroom for the latest updates in medicine, scientific discovery, and next generation medical education, expert sources, and media contact information.
4246
Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer
After trying many ways to get around paywalls, I've landed on 12ft.io. It's simply awesome.
4247
The Math Myth (2016)
Math professor David Edwards sent me this short essay on mathematical education. Printed with his permission. The Math Myth Themath myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were…
4248
Walking the World: Seoul
Consumption, brutality, and the cute
4249
Solving the housing crisis requires fighting monopolies in construction (2020)
U.S. government concerns about great disparities in housing conditions are at least 100 years old. For the first 50 years of this period, U.S. housing crises were widely considered to stem from the failure of the construction industry to adopt new technology -- in particular, factory production methods. The…
4250
Brave’s use of direct mailers
As Brave continues to grow, we find many users who haven't heard of us yet, so we try new marketing channels for efficacy, reach, affordability, and privacy.
4251
Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy. People living in Norway are used to
4252
Notes on Effective Altruism
Long and rough notes on Effective Altruism (EA). Written to help me get to the bottom of several questions: what do I like and think is important about EA? Why do I find the mindset so foreign? Why am I not an EA? And to start me thinking about: what do alternatives to EA look like? The notes are not aimed at…
4253
Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok
It's not just the music biz—legacy media outlets everywhere are playing the same dangerous game. Here's how it will play out.
4254
Science Is Getting Harder
Evidence that discoveries are getting smaller on average
4255
Behind the Scenes: The pots, pans, and people that make millions of meals
Our recipe for feeding includes giant paella pans, combi ovens, and a lot of love!
4256
Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
Or How Competition Returns to Elite Colleges
4257
Tim Hortons app violated laws in collection of ‘vast amounts’ of location data
GATINEAU, QC , June 1, 2022 – People who downloaded the Tim Hortons app had their movements tracked and recorded every few minutes of every day, even when their app was not open, in violation of Canadian privacy laws, a joint investigation by federal and provincial privacy authorities has found.
4258
Who owns Parliament?
This week, MPs have returned to Parliament from their summer recess. As they walk through its corridors, drink in its subsidised bars, and plot in its tea-rooms, I wonder how many MPs stop to ask: …
4259
Thin Platforms
The Microsoft and Stripe developer keynotes were both examples of the rise of Thin Platforms
4260
After millennia of expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’
The world produces more food than ever, but the amount of land we use is now falling. This means we can feed more people while restoring wild habitat.