Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 663 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
2017
163

The Case for RSS

For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet. The MacSparky RSS, for example, gives RSS applications a list of all the articles I post here since you last checked int. It... Continue reading →

166

AdNauseam Banned from the Google Web Store

For 3 years AdNauseam has been used by tens of thousands of Chrome, Firefox and Opera users, who oppose the unethical surveillance advertising model. Now Google banned it from its Web Store on very dubious charges. Furthermore Google locked AdNauseam users out of their ad data. Today it's your privacy tool, tomorrow…

170

The Web in 2050

If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing…

175

Saved by Alice

In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. This 2014 decision has significantly reduced the harm caused by vague and overbroad software patents. Before Alice, patent owners who had...