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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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"…
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
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…
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…
[Hello everyone! Thanks for taking a look at my blog! If you want updates on this project or other things I’m working on, just follow me on twitter ]
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
Trombone emoji skanking it's way into our hearts …
Meta’s new hardware is more impressive than expected, and the Microsoft partnership makes a lot of sense. The question is if Meta will capture enough value to outweigh their costs.
New immigration rules for the UK are being enforced starting February 2026. This means citizens of 85 additional countries (including the USA and European countries) will need an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) to visit, even for tourism. Luckily, you can apply (and pay) digitally. Unfortunately, the government…
Previous major advancements in Computer Science and its applications always felt empowering to me, AI feels different.
It seems that The New York Times Company (“The Times”) got fed up with the pace of its negotiations with Microsoft and OpenAI over their use of The Times’ content for training and…
OR: "fuzzy, wet, and unfalsifiable"
Apple are planning to kill mobile web apps. This is not an exaggeration. We must stop them.
The US will need a lot more tungsten in the future. Where will it come from?
“The decline of Stackoverflow” is now trending on reddit, and I started this post as a comment in the thread, but it got too long. I’m in the 0.01% (whichContinue reading
Every January 1st, an army of open source developers rushes out to update their copyright attributions in licenses and documentation. Why? Because we’ve always done it that way.
In September 2020, Brown University accused students of lying about their location; e.g.:
“The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” –Douglas Adams
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About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
