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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income
Open letter from an Android developer to the Android community and especially to Purnima Kochikar, Director of Google Play, Apps & Games…
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Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
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…
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Member of The European Union
For several reasons, I am instinctively in favour — strongly so — of remaining in the EU: I have a French wife and two bilingual children, and I am an academic living in the age of the …
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The Door Close Button
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.
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UCOP Ordered Spyware Installed on UC Data Networks
The San Francisco Chronicle has coverage of an issue that has been circulating on faculty email networks at UC Berkeley for a few days. ...
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New York City gets a Software Engineering High School
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream…
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It Is Done
When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high le…
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Bag of words, have mercy on us
OR: Claude will you go to prom with me?
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Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?
A data scientist’s perspective
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Attorney General Barr and Encryption
Last month, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy—what is commonly known as “going dark.” Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically…
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Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning
What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. cover songs to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine.
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No more XS4ALL is unthinkable
They are the example of how it should be, the Dutch ISP called XS4ALL. They were bought in '98 by the former state-owned KPN, but continued to operate independently. Born from a group of hackers and the first ISP in the Netherlands, today they are still the example that we measure other ISPs by.
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Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
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When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
Run on sentences, indiscernible insider nods and confusing narrative perspective plague major news publications
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If you have first-hand knowledge of the FDA’s torpor, get in touch
The title says it: if you’re involved in drug or medical development and have experienced the FDA’s torpor, or vengeance, consider getting in touch; anonymously is fine. I want to make …
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Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…
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Apple now censoring dictionaries in the App Store
Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.
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The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return
Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The mar…
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Norway to track all supermarket purchases?
Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy. People living in Norway are used to
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Jobs and Software Is Fucked
Or how I decided to scream into the void about how awful the job market is. I'm still in a very sour mood after the latest rounds of interviews but ultimatel...
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How to know if where you live is “up and coming”: fried chicken vs. coffee shops
Whilst searching for a flat in London, I lamented to hear my estate agent described the area we were in as “up and coming”.
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The US digital service
A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. The U.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying the way startups build products to...
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UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of…
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Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
A rant about websites that collect user data before revealing that a sign-up is required to see the results.