Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,067 posts.
The more I think about the rift between political journalism and Nate Silver, the more it seems that it's one that's fundamentally an issue of epistemology — how journalists know what they know. Here's why I think that's the case. When we talk about the epistemology of journalism, it all eventually ties into…
Do you ever get really mad at your computer?
The manner in which a state kills people has major implications for that state's structure
I used to think Google owning the full vertical stack was a masterstroke. Like TSMC silicon, TPUs, their own data centers, proprietary models, search engine....
Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain"…
Big Brother Watch and other human rights, civil liberties, digital rights, and racial justice organisations have written to the Prime Minister urging him to abandon plans for a mandatory digital ID. The letter comes just days before an expected statement from Keir Starmer announcing the rollout of a mandatory digital…
Many times on this blog I've argued that the difference between pure and applied math is motivation. As my graduate advisor used to say, “Applied mathematics is not a subject classification. It's an attitude.” Traditionally there was general agreement regarding what is pure math and what is applied. Number theory and…
In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: Copied JSON to 📋⧉ JSON"hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun"…
ARLINGTON, Va.—On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by a Texas woman whose home was destroyed by a SWAT team may move […]
In 1923, the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design some homes for workers in his factory near Bordeaux. Le Corbusier duly delivered brigh…
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined…
Or: why you should be a lizard
Transitions: Long time digital advocate, security researcher, and developer Jacob Appelbaum...
Today, I’m excited to share that we have completed the Coursera-Udemy combination, bringing together two mission-driven companies to create one of the world’s most comprehensive skills development platforms.
Stephen Wolfram shares interesting Facebook data analysis finds from the Data Donor program of Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook.
Monday was a frustrating day as the Assange Hearing drifted deep into a fantasy land where nobody knows or is allowed to say that people were tortured in Guantanamo Bay and under extraordinary rendition. The willingness of Judge Baraitser to accept American red lines on what witnesses can and cannot say has combined…
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued countless bad software patents. These patents tend to be hopelessly vague and overbroad. Indeed, they are often so packed with indecipherable patent jargon that software engineers have trouble understanding them. As one programmer...
With the announcement of the iPad, the usual suspects have come out decrying a closed, proprietary, fully locked down system. For instance, a story on the top of Hacker News today [http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/27/how-a-great-product-can-be-bad-news-apple-ipad-and-the-closed-
Everyone wants to know how my month offline was. They ask it casually, like “How’s work going?” or “What’d you do this weekend?” But it’s not a casual question. It was a huge, incredible, transformative experience. Those 30 days felt like six months. My habits changed, my relationships changed, my identity changed, my…
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It was supposed to be magazines.Elaine Wooton contacted me as many people do - in the middle of a shutdown and discard project, asking if the Internet Archive might want some of what is destined for deep storage or the trash compactor. In this case, she said, there might be some old journals and magazines
In which I attempt to be pragmatic. Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? This is a question where freedom, practicality, and reality all collide into a mess. Google has recently announced that Android users will only be able to install apps which have been digitally signed…
A bigger world is better for everyone
