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A short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems
Every so often a news article will make the rounds of the internet – or, for that matter, a paper will be published in an academic journal – presenting a new ‘decipherment’ …
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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Elsevier journals: has anything changed?
Greg Martin, a number theorist at UBC (the University of British Columbia in Vancouver) doesn’t think so, so he has decided to resign from the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of N…
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UBI as a productivity dividend
Why Universal Basic Income (UBI) Is the Only Way to Share AI and Productivity Gains With Everyone
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Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based, managerial, or administrative...
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My diatribe against “skeptics” (2016)
April 10, 2023. The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism , which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy
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A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
[Edit May 2024: This concept was republished in Asterisk Magazine.] Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agri…
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In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
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AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties advocacy group, recently published a good article entitled “ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.” 1 It argues that providers within the internet “stack” should refrain from censoring traffic according to their own values. That…
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New Facebook Feature Empowers the Dangerous "Comment Nazis"
"You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly � Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."
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The internet is slipping out of our reach
With AI encroaching every open forum on the internet, the future of human discourse is bleak.
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Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts
The following tweet has been making the rounds on social media: Notice that since the Democrats won overall, it would be impossible for Republicans to win all seven districts, no matter how the map…
6283
The Car That Watches You Back: The Advertising Infrastructure of Modern Cars
How the connected car became an advertising surface. From Stellantis startup pop-ups to GSTV pumps to Gulp Radio aisles, and the consent infrastructure the automobile never developed.
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Too Much Internet
I consider myself fairly “up” with popular trends. Perhaps I don’t know every celebrity crush, or every new thing that every TikTok…
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Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
A lot of community applications died when API access to twitter, reddit & others was severely restricted, but they can't stop us from sharing our own data with each other!
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The last new subway line in Japan
On December 6, 2015, the Sendai Subway’s Tōzai (East-West) Line opened. The second line of a provincial Japanese city, this event passed entirely under the radar of the Western media and ev…
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Unix is both a technology and an idea
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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“The Mind in the Wheel” lays out a new foundation for the science of mind
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
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When random people give money to random other people (2017)
A post on Decision Science about a problem of Uri Wilensky’s has been making the rounds: Imagine a room full of 100 people with 100 dollars each. With every tick of the clock, every person wi…
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Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)
This footage has gone viral online with the claim that it shows an 3 year old chimney sweep on the job: Millions of people saw the footage, shared it online an were upset by it, as they should be&#…
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The Penguin Random House trial
The Penguin Random House trial is ripping the lid off publishing
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The FDA's perpetual process machine
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
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Bruce Perens: Invasion of the Ethical Licenses (2019)
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those…
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The evolution of expert communities
A look at how online forums grow, thrive, and then decay.
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Techmeme vs Hacker News
My two favorite tech news aggregators are Techmeme and Hacker News. I visit both multiple times per day for a quick scan of what is going on in techland. They are very different and you can see that in action this morning. Here is the above the fold Techmeme right now (9am eastern): We might […]
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Mountain Lion quietly includes app blacklist and security restrictions
Today I went to launch VMware 4.1.0 on my OS X 10.8.1 Mac and was met with this surprising refusal to open:
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So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
It is with deep regret that I announce the closure of Whitechapel Bell Foundry , the world’s most famous bell foundry and Britain’s oldest manufacturing company. Below you can read my interview with Alan Hughes, the last in a line of bell founders stretching back to 1420, who will retire next year at sixty-eight years…
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Twitter Bots Use Likes, RTs for Intimidation
I awoke this morning to find my account on Twitter ( @briankrebs ) had attracted almost 12,000 new followers overnight. Then I noticed I’d gained almost as many followers as the number of re-tweets (RTs) earned for a tweet I published on Tuesday . The tweet stated how every time I tweet something related to Russian…
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