The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
There is bipartisan support for several proposals to reduce the effects of climate change, especially for large scale tree-plantings to help absorb carbon emissions and offering tax credits to businesses that capture carbon emissions.
Designing humility and forgiveness into social media products
When social media was taking shape fifteen-odd years ago, the concept of “context collapse” helped frame and explain the phenomenon. Young scholars like Danah Boyd and Michael Wesch, bu…
On April 16—gosh, it feels like an entire year ago—I made some predictions about where we were going. How do they hold up?
Barely 10 years past the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the U.S. economy is doing well on several fronts. The labor market is on a job-creating streak that…
COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country.The services often sound relatively innocuous. Some vendors bill their tools as “automatic time tracking”...
Old Web features — frontend and UI patterns
It is with a heavy heart that the Museum of Digital Art announces today the untimely closure of its location in Zurich at the end of July 2020. After four years of successful growth, Europe’s first physical museum dedicated to digital art was hit hard by the Covid19 lockdown, as it runs without any public funding…
Comparing the process of furnishing two apartments—one in Ecuador, the other in the U.S.—was a reminder: order and efficiency aren't always what they're cracked up to be.
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
In the last few years, you’ve likely seen a fair few comments about monopolies in the tech industry, and suggestions for breaking them up…
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
Was GitHub down more after Microsoft acquired them? We analyzed their status page and found a 41% increase in disruptions.
It’s easy to say “Break up Big Tech companies!” Depending how politics unfold, the thing might become possible, but figuring out the details will be hard. I spent the last sixteen years of my life working for Big Tech and have educated opinions on the subject. Today: Why and how we should break up Google.
ZERO-SUM THINKING ON IMMIGRATION WILL MAKE AMERICA POORER Beatrice Magistro Nicolas Wittstock On June 23rd 2020, President Donald Trump imposed restrictions on several categories of visas for foreign workers until the end of the year. The proclamation his administration issued explaining this decision suspended…
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism
I'm doing some reconstruction. If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link .
And why I am trying to minimize my dependence on external libraries (whenever possible).
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
I might be well behind others on this subject, but I’m trying to catch up. I just finished a book entitled Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: how microfinance lost its way and betrayed th…
