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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral. Except if we look…
My thoughts on the friendship recession and what I'm doing to maintain friendships.
Want someone else to think for you? Watch the news. Want to be distracted? Watch the news. Want something to get mad about? Watch the news. A recent passage in The Daily Stoic discussed the negative impact of hearing bad news – something like a tsunami destroying a village, or a terroris
A journey into Kindle A.I. slop hell with Leah Beckmann
Like many people across the world, I’m using my quarantine effectively: by catching up on all the video games I wasn’t able to play while traveling. The game at the top of my list? Spider-Man, which was widely recognized as one of the top games of 2018. The game is features an open-world, which means you can travel…
At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One…
The history of credit cards helps explain why Plaid is valuable to Visa, and how Visa can make it significantly better.
The Paint.NET web site runs ads designed to lead naïve users to download unrelated adware. This needs to stop
Chicago and Bally's have teamed up in an investment offering.
This is what we know: On November 24, 2015, the Wu-Tang Clan sold its latest album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin , through an online auction house. As one of the most innovative rap groups, the Wu-Tang Clan had used concepts for their recordings before, but the latest album would be their highest concept: it would…
One of the criticisms leveled at Bitcoin by those people determined to hate it is that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible.
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …
We are facing a EU regulation which may make it impossible to install a custom piece of software on most radio decives like WiFi routers, smartphones and embedded devices. You can now give feedback on …
(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time) A few people have aske…
Readers know I have been grappling for a while with the vexing question of the balance between the surveillance state and the threat of Jihadist terrorism. When the NSA leaks burst onto the scene, …
Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia . Here are early impressions.
Somalia has long played host to one of the world's strangest monetary phenomenon, a paper currency without a central bank. I explored the...
I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
An exploration into the internet's most simple domain names
Dear Mr. Khan, A year ago, I expressed my concerns on the Washington Post’s blog that your decimal place value videos and exercises failed to incorporate very basic knowledge about how people…
A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future of software, books, music, and movies, in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse, while the human-made variant moves into a luxury segment of its own.
When I discovered Google Fi six months ago, I thought to myself, “Finally, a phone service that accomplishes everything I need at a…
A couple of weeks ago, I was drinking beer in San Francisco with friends when someone quipped: “You have too many hipsters, you won’t scale like that. Hire some fat guys who know C++.” It’s funny, but it got me thinking. Who are the “fat guys who know C++”, or as someone else put it, “theContinue reading "the secret…
