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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 700 posts.
This may seem a strange heading for someone whose career is in computers, yet I feel that this article has been a lifetime in the making. It is the product of intuitive observations and things that have stood out to me, even as a child, who even then could sense the sinister side of the most banal of technologies.
Recent revelations from an alleged industry insider paint a disturbing picture
An overview of 4 theories
Consider the user's perspective when naming a security initiative
After 16 hours of discussion, negotiators from the European Parliament and EU governments have just made deal on a new EU Digital Services Act. Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer sat at the negotiating table as Rapporteur for the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) and summarises: "We were able to p
When it comes to inflation, economists get it wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere differential.
The key question about AI and school is about the past
Today I’m leaving Twitter, because I don’t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll. But also because it’s probably going to break down. Read on for details.
At the behest of a friend of mine, I decided to get myself a Privacy.com account. I filled it out with my personal information, activated the account, and...
Sitting exams is unpleasant at the best of times, but my daughter believes she has extra cause to complain. Two of her A-level papers are scheduled for the same time, so she must take a break betwe…
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that…
Shell companies, rubbing elbows with international criminals, and worse in his scam of scams
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post...
Providence is a health giant whose anchor is a network of Catholic hospitals. They colluded with McKinsey to steal from their poorest patients, by deceiving them about their eligibility for free care, saddling poor, sick people with crushing debts:
How a misunderstood platform has completely taken over the world.
Here’s a simple way to take over Twitter for way less than $43 billion dollars.
All the growth in the music business now comes from old songs—with consumption of new music actually shrinking. How did we get here, and is there a way back?
While I don’t care too much about ideas and projects that I believe to be dead ends or maybe even doomed to fail eventually, a recent interaction on Superhighway84 got me to write down a few thoughts on why I believe Project Gemini is a really bad idea.
A brief discussion on Reddit about my post criticizing Penn Station expansion plans led me to write a very long comment, which I’d like to hoist to a full post explaining how big an urban tra…
Bruce Faulconer deserves better, but the system seems rigged against him
Correction: An earlier draft of this story misstated a technical detail; Mark didn’t email his photo to his doctor; rather, he took the photo with his phone and the image was automatically synched to his Google Photos account, triggering a scan .
At my university, one of our internal software systems allows a professor to submit a revision to a course. The professor might change the content or the objectives of the course. In a university, professors have extensive freedom regarding course content. As long as you reasonably meet the course objectives, you can…
On first looking at J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and George Orwell (1903-1950) they appear to have little in common, as men or writers, other than being peculiarly English authors with evergreen book sales. The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and…
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce…
Software is broken, but it's not because of NPM, startups, AI, or venture capitalists. A deep dive into how we think about and produce code, and how our software systems reflect the manic state of the modern world.
Artificial Scarcity and the Semmelweis Reflex
