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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
We’re all used to having to identify ourselves as we enter a country. It is the only way we can hope to have any attempt at a secure border. But, so-called “exit controls,” wher…
On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways…
With BYOD, companies are more than ever keen on protecting their data. MDM tools, like Google Apps, do more than that; they invade your privacy.
Some of my points are a bit naughty. But I maintain that they're based in fact and fairly widely known. So well-known, in fact, that I'm surprised to have never read it somewhere else.
Forgotten musings on the economics of AI, an intelligence explosion, and machine consciousness
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interp
Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear…
The DMCA online safe harbor is a notice-and-takedown scheme. Web hosts aren’t liable for copyright-infringing third-party uploads unless and until the copyright owner submits a proper takedown notice to the host, at which point the web host can remain legally...
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins).
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
Now this is pretty weird: I just got blocked by Twitter for a tweet that I did not make:
The Windows 11 announcement was fun and interesting, but there is a reason that Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft’s business.
Codeberg drew a democratic, but suboptimal line.
Stupid reasons to not allow remote work. Dumb reasons to reject remote work.
A complete copy of the 140 things that WikiLeaks said journalists weren’t supposed to say about Julian Assange
Plus! The Other X; Refinancing China; The Activist Short Death Spiral; Rebundling; Fitness Bands; Diff Jobs
Come for the schools, be used as pawns for politics.
“Happiness is for stupid people.” That’s a common complaint I hear from smart overachievers. They think only dumb or lazy people can be happy. Entrepreneurs will say, “I don’t want to be happy because I want to be successful.” They worry that if they get too happy they’ll lose their desire and won’t work hard anymore…
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone
On the responsibility of engineers
The TSA says it is possible to fly without ID , but then goes on to state that you still have to prove your identity in some way. If the purpose is to thwart hijackings, then it should be sufficient to simply give anonymous passengers additional screening. But that's not the purpose of ID.
I think turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea. However, recent news coverage has been framing the weaponization of pagers and radios in the Middle East as something we do not need to concern ourselves with because “we” are safe.
