3091
One of Apple’s Best Ideas Ever — Made Worse
They are not infallible design geniuses at Apple. Its MagSafe connector used to be a design marvel and a joy to use. Then Apple made it worse. It’s now annoying and useless.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
3092
TSA Admits In Leaked Doc: No Evidence of Terrorist Plots Against Aviation in US
A couple weeks ago, I filed a brief in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in my case challenging the constitutionality of the TSA’s nude body scanners and invasive pat-down program. My bri…
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3094
Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to help track, and explain stimulus funds
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
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3096
Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA
This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From source…
3097
The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
3098
Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have no other choice but to delete the websites I developed for learning Java, PHP, C#, Scala, HTML, Linux etc.
3099
Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense
I’ve been concerned about the excesses of the blockchain industry and their spread into all parts of society for some time now. Here I’ve summarized my thoughts regarding the subject.
3100
I don't want anything your AI generates
AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative (of content, labor and the environment).
3101
Lufthansa has not banned AirTags
Lufthansa has not banned Apple AirTags and I think it is clear why: it is the sort of rule that would practicably be unenforceable.
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3103
Taking Children Seriously
Read Elliot Temple's essay about Taking Children Seriously.
3104
Studios: Please don't spoil the movie we are seated to see
I tweeted this incredibly non-controversial take and it got a huge reaction, so I thought I'd recycle the content for a blog post. Enjoy. We...
3105
Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them
Chase Sunset & Vine, 2012. Painting by Alex Schaefer There is a fundamental asymmetry to banking. Banks don't like to share higher inte...
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3107
Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores
The US has become a hostile and authoritarian state to foreign scientists and is choosing ideology over science.
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We may have witnessed a NSA "Shotgiant" TAO-like action
Last Friday, the New York Times reported that the NSA has hacked/infiltrated Huawei, a big Chinese network hardware firm. We may have witne...
3110
Gmail is killing independent email
Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone... unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t...
3111
Viral “racism in academia” story deleted when I started asking questions
Do Western names lead to more callbacks than Middle Eastern ones? Heck if I know, but this viral Twitter thread won't get you any closer to the truth
3112
The SymPy/HackerRank DMCA Incident
Thank you to Ondřej Čertík, Oscar Benjamin, Travis Oliphant, and Pamela Chestek for reviewing this blog post. Any errors in the post are my own. On April 19, 2022, for approximately 11.5 hours, the do
3113
Engineering Pornography (2002)
This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…
3114
Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines
The challenge The authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely w…
3115
Google helps Scientology billionaire Bob Duggan hide a dark family secret (2015)
Recently, we told you that California pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Bob Duggan — a man currently worth $2.3 billion — had, through an agent, complained to Google about a story we wrote about him.
3116
Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
3117
AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. Like a cruise ship hea…
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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)
Garbage in garbage out
3120
People don't want to run their own bank
When I was young, I had a piggy bank. A piggy bank is incredibly secure. It's fairly big - so it is hard to lose. It is brightly coloured - so you can find it easily. No one else can see how much money there is in there. The only way to get money out is to smash it - providing visible evidence if someone has robbed…