The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 694 posts.
Some years ago, Matt Daniels [1] wrote a great article on who has the largest vocabulary in hip-hop. I thought it was brilliant: comparing Shakespeare to famous hip-hop artists. It got me thinking and gave me the inspiration of doing something similar with a genre I love: Power Metal. People …
Welcome! The fact that you’re reading this means that you probably care deeply about the issue of privacy, which warms our hearts. Unfortunately, even though you care about privacy, or perhaps because you care so much about it, you may feel that there's not much you (or anyone) can really do to...
In 2010, Congress capped fees for debit card networks so merchants don't get gouged by Visa and Mastercard. But the Fed stuck in a loophole for Discover. And that is leading Capital One to buy it.
A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
Posted on Wednesday 21 Feb 2024. 1,196 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.
The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like.
12 Challenges readers Thandeka Xaba and Toby Mather raised some great points in the comments for yesterday’s Typology piece (thanks so much!).
Apple are planning to kill mobile web apps. This is not an exaggeration. We must stop them.
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.
I used to be a big fan of Spotify. Today I cancelled my subscription.
I cannot convey the supreme depths to which I’d rather be doing anything else with my Saturday afternoon other than writing this blog post, but here we are. If you have been blessedly insulat…
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
KYC was sold as a way to stop criminals. In practice it excludes the unbanked, leaks personal data on dark web markets, and surveils everyone else.
YouTuber Josh Cahill, who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, reviews flights and courts drama, it seems. Just a couple of months ago he was banned by Qatar Airways over a negative review. Now he’s taken on East Timor’s Aero Dili.
Several years ago I had the chance to lead two seminars with a group of high-performing Chinese high school seniors. Each seminar had between 20-35 kids; each of these students was a graduating sen…
A proposal to end exclusionary zoning would allow for 100,000 more homes in Berkeley's neighborhoods.
There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running…
The enduring success of her early 19th century novels are in large part due to their persistent relevance
If you ship a Web App in the EU and will be impacted by this, please sign our open letter to Tim Cook. It is critical that we gather as much evidence as possible to prevent Apple from breaking Web Apps in the EU.
How do we prepare them for what we're not prepared for?
When Findaway Voices first appeared, it made it comparatively easy for independent authors to do audiobooks. Audio was still hard, mind you, but it was possible.
Previous major advancements in Computer Science and its applications always felt empowering to me, AI feels different.
The comapny uses manipulative designs to prevent people from obtaining a free copy of their data in accordance with law
The Brookings Institution did a fascinating survey series over the last five years. I have two takeways from this: The first is that focused and persistent propaganda is able to shift public opinio…
Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023 , compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% of grades were As in 2020-2021, 10%…
