4021
Why Gas Is So Expensive Today (Hint: It’s Not Libya)
If you’re visiting this page it’s probably because you’ve come here to read my post about the impact of commodity speculation on oil prices.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
4022
I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription
A personal blog of diverse opinions.
4023
Prediction Markets
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
4024
Klout Is Odious
The positioning of Klout is gross, turning ordinary social interactions into some sort of game with a competitive score. Of course there are meaningless achievements . But what’s most loathsome is the primary purpose of Klout is to offer “Perks” (aka “ads”) to you based on your Klout score. Yes, I can get a free…
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The Tale of Daniel
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about the strangest markets on the internet. This year I went down a different rabbit hole. Daniel has been a top 5 baby name twice since 2000. There…
4028
I swear the UFO is coming any minute
Links 'n' updates
4029
Your Words are Wasted
It needs to be said again, perhaps this time more strongly. Your Blog is The ...
4030
What OpenStreetMap can be
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.
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Cars suck, man
What better way to start off the new year than with a little rant.
4034
Will California Eliminate Anonymous Web Browsing? (Comments on CA AB 2273)
I’m continuing my coverage of dangerous Internet bills in the California legislature. This job is especially challenging during an election year, when legislators rally behind the “protect the kids” mantra to pursue bills that are likely to hurt, or at...
4035
5G Skeptic
When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there’d be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn’t believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G…
4036
When did New York start building slowly?
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
4037
Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
4038
Programming won’t be automated, or it already has been
I’m afraid of a robot taking my job. I don’t care about the job part much, I’m afraid of the actual robot. To replace my job it’d need to exhibit human level intelligence. That’s scary. Before that happens though, maybe some of its infantile, and less scary, brethren can make my job a bit easier. […]
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The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.
4041
The behavior of LLMs in hiring decisions: Systemic biases in candidate selection
Hints of discrimination and lack of principled reasoning in frontier AI systems
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A Compass for the Politics of Collapse
The word "collapse" appears more and more often in recent political debate. Online, in the media, in the Academia, and in radical politic...
4044
The Ethics of Web Performance
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
4045
We got hit by an alarmingly well-prepared phish spammer
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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How printers and Photoshop detect and refuse to process images of currency
Professor Steven J. Murdoch
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Behavioral Profiling: The password you can't change
You can be identified by how you type, even behind proxies and Tor. Protect yourself with KeyboardPrivacy.
4050
Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
Want to learn more? Learn To Count to a Billion in Korean in 15 Minutes ! Or Learn to Read Russian in 15 Minutes !