The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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…
Discover Khan World School @ ASU Prep, a fully online school for grades 6-12 with mastery-based learning, global collaboration and college credit options.
The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day. This is because at Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire, and strive…
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…
(Stockholm, 25 April 2022) Total global military expenditure increased by 0.7 per cent in real terms in 2021, to reach $2113 billion. The five largest spenders in 2021 were the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom and Russia, together accounting for 62 per cent of expenditure, according to new data on…
Unless Maybe You are Adele
There is probably no greater gift that two parents can give to their children than to provide them with a safe, stable and nurturing environment until they feel confident and independent enough to leave the nest. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has placed the support of safe, stable and nurturing…
A peek behind the curtain into the struggles of the Chinese censorship office
Some of the forces blocking really new ideas in science
Garbage in garbage out
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Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …
Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in […]
After 16 hours of discussion, negotiators from the European Parliament and EU governments have just made deal on a new EU Digital Services Act. Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer sat at the negotiating table as Rapporteur for the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) and summarises: "We were able to p
TikTok culture can be incredibly toxic, but those on the left refuse to ever condemn it for fear of echoing conservatives
What would “open sourcing the Twitter algorithm” actually look like? In Part 1 of this series, we focus on understanding how Twitter’s algorithmic feed works under the hood.
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general
Webreturn web design & development, Scotland2022266 points216 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
Grrrh! I could get really annoyed about this! Living and working in rural Stirlingshire has its advantages for sure, but fast broadband is not one of them.
When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech's centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.
Simulation, Gamification, and the Rise of Algorithmic Capitalism
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
I love Longmont’s municipal broadband, but we had to fight Comcast every step of the way to get it.
Crypto is known for its toxicity towards outsiders. Similar attitudes are emerging from some who oppose crypto.
