Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 580 posts.
Education is Our Generation's Big Problem. Let's Fix it.
Build practical, job-relevant skills with ready-made learning pathways and custom programs from Chegg Skills for employers, higher education, and government.
Rogue Amoeba responds to Phil Schiller
Visit the Rogue Amoeba blog to read more.
On Anonymity
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…
SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society.
About a year ago I built a Chrome extension called SiteChat -- the premise was simple: turn every website into a chatroom. The app was an instant success, and over the following year I watched entire societies emerge and die off inside the bizarre ecosystem that I had created. Genesis and
Responding to Beggars
In the late 70s, a beggar outside Harvard Square station asked for a quarter to take the subway. I gave him one. As I walked down the stairs I noticed that he was not coming along. Instead he was asking another person for a quarter to take the subway. I looked at him for a minute to show him I knew he had lied to me.
The Strange Case of John Dillinger and the Fraudulent Apple ID
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.
The future of GNOME
Having just returned from GUADEC and now having the desktop as my job focus I been thinking about where we are going and what to do next. Benjamin managed to get quite a bit of press for his abysmally negative post, but I think his mis-stated the situation quite badly. As Dave Mason said during...
How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma
On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...
Urban trees reveal income inequality
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid
Kids these days: the quality of new Wikipedia editors over time
As part of the 2011 Wikimedia Summer of Research, we uncovered a possible correlation between the decline in new active editors that began in 2007 and the rise of warnings issued to new users by bo…
EU court: Reverse engineering OK, API not protected by (c) and more
This case (SAS v WPL) has a lot in common with the Oracle v Google case in the US.
Doctorow & Stross's "The Rapture of the Nerds" creative commons edition released
We promised it, and here it is (slightly delayed by a signing tour and epic-level jet lag): "The Rapture of the Nerds" by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross is available as a Creative Commons licensed download right here: The Rapture of the Nerds .
The Slow Web Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980). (Source: https://www.youtube.com/) The slow web started as a vague idea framed as a joke. When we put our site out into the world on January 2, 2011, we only proces
The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History
Folks, I’ve said I’m not a fan of Wikipedia for nearly ten years now. I used to mention it in presentations until I found that eighteen-year-olds would confront me at the end, like I sp…
UK'S shadow Internet minister says she is "particularly stupid"
I remarked earlier about Helen Goodman MP and her total lack of technical knowledge. An MP being a bit behind the times isn't the greatest shock - but she's Labour's Shadow Minister for Culture, Media, and Sport - that's a big deal! This year, Claire Perry MP produced an "independent" report into online child…
Unicode is, in 2012, still “cutting edge.”
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…