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Against All Applications
Imagining better ways of picking people
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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Thrun pivots Udacity toward vocational education
Internet applications and technology and their implications for individuals, organizations and society
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Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign:
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Travel locally, where you are
Many people dream of traveling to faraway places to experience new cultures and sightseeing.
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Baiting the bot
LLM chatbots can be engaged in endless "conversations" by considerably simpler text generation bots. This has some interesting implications.
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Ends, Means, and Antitrust
Google is a monopoly, and almost certainly a bad actor: shopping, though, is a terrible example that shows how regulators can go wrong.
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Why American Mothers are Superior
I really did not have time to write this today, but two articles I read made me drop what I was doing. First was the Wall Street Journal article by a Yale law professor who says Chinese mothers are superior because they produce more mathematical and musical prodigies.
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Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course
[BRADYcore] TARGETED TRAINING. REAL RESULTS.
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Tumblr the Day After
It is not surprising that the news about Automattic buying Tumblr has picked up a lot of coverage. I especially appreciated the notes of support from Tumblr founder David Karp, former CTO Marco Arm…
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Woo for Its Own Sake
Software development is a funny profession. It covers people who do stuff ranging from register twiddling in device drivers and OS guts, to people who serve web content, to “big data” s…
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The “walled garden” becomes a prison for reality
A British tabloid revealed today that Apple has filed for a patent on a system for disabling the video camera on an iPhone or iPad when its user attempts to film a concert or other interdicted live event. This is a much more threatening development than most may realize.
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The Great Moon Hoax
On August 25, 1835 the <i>New York Sun</i> announced the discovery of life on the moon. It explained that the discovery had been made by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had invented a new telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle. Over the course of the next week the <i>Sun</i>…
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The Trouble with “Finding Your People” Online
Create beautiful emails, automate campaigns, and track performance. Try it now and see how our tools can drive your business.
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On The Need For Understanding
I saw this Mastodon post from Andy Wingo recently: in these days of coding agents and what-not, i often think of gerald sussman's comm...
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A successful example of "adversarial collaboration"
We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. . . . Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated…
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The Burial of William the Conqueror: A Comedy of Errors
William the Conqueror is one of those historical figures who need no introduction. Thanks to his famous victory at Hastings in 1066, he dra...
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Bifurcation: The secret giant islands formed when rivers split
As I’m sure you’re aware, rivers usually combine together to make larger and larger rivers until they reach the sea.However, there are some exceptions: rivers do sometimes split up and flow in separate directions. These splits are called “bifurcations” (bi” meaning “two”, and “furcations” being the forks). They happen…
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