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Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?
12 Challenges readers Thandeka Xaba and Toby Mather raised some great points in the comments for yesterday’s Typology piece (thanks so much!).
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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Street address errors in Google Maps
(or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively)Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder…
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Buy Your Friends Batteries
Pool your money and give your friends batteries that lower their electricity bills and keep essential devices running during outages.
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What I believe II
Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the “new” P≠NP proof: I’d again bet $200,000 that the paper won’t stand, except that the last time I tried that, it d…
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You Are in a Box
your data is trapped inside the box that is your program. you can only see what the program author exposes.
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What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
It is hard not to be impressed — and perhaps a little alarmed — by the progression. In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue beat the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov. It was a hugely ex…
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What the fuck happened to nerds
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
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Life After Language
In October 2013, I wrote a post arguing that computing was disrupting language and that this was the Mother of All Disruptions . My specific argument was that…
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“How Do TSA Employees Feel About Working For a Despised Agency?”
This one comes from Rod. “Would you know if the TSA higher-ups acknowledge the outcry against the agency and how they are attempting to handle said outcry? And are the screeners themselves aw…
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Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web…
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The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know
I want a new protocol, tentatively called “Let Me Know” (LMK). The purpose is to provide someone an anonymous way to get notified when a singular, specific event occurs. Here’s a basic use case: Some random blog author has published Parts 1 and 2 of a series. You enjoyed it, and you want to know…
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Stackoverflow Is A Difficult Community to Participate In
These are a few of the reasons why I have difficulty in participating in the StackOverflow community. I was once a very active user, but due to these reasons, and a few unstated, I am unable to participate in the community anymore. The Eternal September Issue. Many new users of StackOverflow...
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Apple Rejects the Hey Calendar from Their App Store
There should at least be a standard of double jeopardy when it comes to the app store monopoly regimes. If you’ve managed to overturn a rejection of your service once, they can’t come after you on the same service again later. We could have used that today! But unfortunately there is no rule of law with the app…
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On Tolkien and Orwell
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…
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Here’s to the Misfits
The school I went to in England used to proudly display their famous alumni in black and white photos circling the theatre lobby. From John le Carré, to John Cleese, the list included notable actors, top politicians and accomplished actors. What the school didn't tell admiring visitors though, is
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The UK "Porn" Filter Blocks Kids' Access To Tech, Civil Liberties Websites
It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites, or civi...
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Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures
Photos of the Los Angeles River
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What we get wrong about meetings, and how to make them worth attending
I rely on Google Calendar to tell me where I am supposed to be, when and with whom. When the service collapsed for an afternoon last month, it felt like a teachable moment. For a few seconds, I pan…
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The Slow Web
A popular old essay about finding calm and rhythm online.
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Social Psychology Is A Flamethrower
Mark Twain:There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. If this is true of all science, it is doubly true o…
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The View from RSS
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
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Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
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Warrantless encryption is a first amendment issue
Encryption is privacy incarnate – don’t ban it
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