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Microfinance Is Mostly a Scam (2015)
I might be well behind others on this subject, but I’m trying to catch up. I just finished a book entitled Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: how microfinance lost its way and betrayed th…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 490 posts.
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The End of the American Internet
For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and atti
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Assange Hearing Day 3
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
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Decentralize Messaging
Twitter is funding a team to decentralize social media. I think they should start with messaging.
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What is the value of browser diversity?
In May 2019 I attended a talk by Mike Taylor who works on webcompat at Mozilla. Mike told the sordid story of window.event, a non-standard IE invention that was replicated in Konqueror, which showed up in Webkit, which stuck around in Blink, and was now Mike’s problem in Firefox. It was a good story fraught with ups…
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Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps
After roughly five months of appeasing users with new feature after new feature after new feature , the other shoe has finally dropped. Today, Strava sold its segmented soul. At least, if you believe Strava Segments are the soul of what makes Strava, well, Strava.
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MSU Vice President of research & innovation Steve Hsu has been forced to resign
President Stanley asked me this afternoon for my resignation. I do not agree with his decision, as serious issues of academic freedom and fr...
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Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done
Groucho Marx? Fred Waring? Ed Gardner? Goodman Ace? Jane Ace? Fred Allen? Ernie Kovacs? Deane Binder? Anonymous?
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Is Cyberpunk Dead? A Conversation with Bruce Bethke
Based on discussions with Bruce Bethke, creator of the word cyberpunk and author of its first story, Dr. Joseph Hurtgen and I discuss the future of the genre.
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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility (2010)
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
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Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a ...
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The international student bait-and-switch
Come for the schools, be used as pawns for politics.
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How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
From 2019 on, the Latvian National Archive offers access to various KGB documents.The Archive digitized operation cases and also special KGB training manuals.
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Solar storm risk and EMP attacks
A Q&A style dialogue to separate fact from fiction.
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The polls messed up
To continue our post-voting, pre-vote-counting assessment (see also here and here ), I want to separate two issues which can get conflated: 1. Problems with poll-based election forecasts.
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What's wrong with social science and how to fix it
Replication, citations, power, incentives, and more.
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Pseudonymity as a Trivial Concession to Genius
Update (6/24): For further thoughts and context about this unfolding saga, see this excellent piece by Tom Chivers (author of The AI Does Not Hate You, so far the only book about the rationalist co…
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Assange Hearing Day 8
The great question after yesterday’s hearing was whether prosecution counsel James Lewis QC would continue to charge at defence witnesses like a deranged berserker (spoiler – he would), and more importantly, why? QC’s representing governments usually seek to radiate calm control, and treat defence arguments as almost…
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Pandemic Villains: Robinhood
Have a pair of gangly Stanford grads built the perfect mousetrap?
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Covid-19: The T Cell Story
When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does…
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The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Naval Officer? Voltaire? William Pitt Lennox? Herb Caen? Howard Jacobs? Norman R. Augustine? Anonymous?
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Fixing Google Map Transit Feed Mistakes in Taiwan
Probably one of the nerdier things I do in my free time is fix and report transit errors on Google Maps. Accurate transit directions and schedules are extremely important if we want more people to take transit more often, especially in scenarios where good transit options exist! I do these bug reports and the…
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On the Graying of Gnome
The GNOME project turned 23 this year, and despite equally persistent rumors to the contrary, it's still alive and kicking. Just how alive, though?
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Why We Sleep: A Tale of Institutional Failure
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
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Twitter, Responsibility, and Accountability
Twitter went too far last week for reasons that go back to 2016 and the unfair blaming of tech for media’s mistakes.