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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
Jobs Inside the API
If someone is worse at their job than a drunk person with Google, why do they still have their job?
Smoking around the world
Tobacco smoking is one of the world’s largest health problems today.
My experience with Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine
Translator and proofreader’s note: There are large parts of this document that don’t parse well either from Chinese or from Naomi’s written…
How Does Mastodon Work?
I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.
Firefox removes RSS support
gHacks recently reported that Mozilla plans to remove support for RSS & Atom related features. Specifically Live Bookmarks and their feed reader.
Nearly Half of Americans Are Lonely
Social isolation can be as unhealthy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and loneliness affects nearly half of Americans—but few organizations are addressing this critical psychosocial risk factor. Here are three strategies, shared by leading organizations, to address the epidemic.
Wikipedia bans agenda-driven editor, but punishes the messenger too
A look at a Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign to discredit anti-war campaigners and journalists
The Bullshit Web
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]
Removing Bad Actors on Facebook
We removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.
How to read Plato (1995)
This page is part of the "e-mail archives" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues , dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "e-mail archives" section includes HTML edited versions of posts that I submitted on various e-mail discussion lists about Plato and ancient philosophy. Note: I…
The Wisdom And/or Madness of Crowds
an interactive guide to human networks
A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no…
Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
NOTE 8/23: I've written a more thoughtful version of this argument for the Atlantic. They're not the same, but if you only read one piece, ...
The death of a TLD
Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out.
What OpenStreetMap can be
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.