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What I learned trying to classify abortion access across the rich world
Rich countries are not monolithic. However, outside the US and a few microstates, they vary in a limited range.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,047 posts.
452
Crimes against transhumanity
(Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)
453
$9.99/month
With subscriptions now the norm of the app world, I wanted to take a closer look & see how those little monthly microtransactions added up.
454
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?
455
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…
456
We could have universal Covid vaccines soon
Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way
457
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...
458
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.
459
Why rails buckle in Britain
Why don’t rails get hot in Europe? The truth is they do.
460
'Zero trust’ security is a poor choice of words
Consider the user's perspective when naming a security initiative
461
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
463
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
469
Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes
A textbook currency crisis, triggered by a bunch of policy mistakes.
470
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.
471
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 …
472
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.
474
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…
476
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…
477
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