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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
I've always attributed slow Xcode launches to Xcode simply sucking, but I've noticed that the FileMerge app frequently launches slowly too. When this happens, the app can take a dozen bounces in the Dock before finally opening. FileMerge resides in the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/ within the Xcode bundle…
In May, some friends and I built Tagger News, a real-time automatic classifier of Hacker News articles based on their text (see here for more about how we built it). This process started me down some interesting paths, particularly analyzing trends in titles. By finding words that became more or less common in Hacker…
In 1623 the German Wilhelm Schickard produced the first known designs for a mechanical calculator. Twenty years later Blaise Pascal produced a machine of an improved design, aiming to help with the large amount of tedious arithmetic required in his role as a tax collector. The interest in mechanical calculation showed…
On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...
In some Amish communities these days, e-bikes are beginning to outnumber buggies on the roads. Horse-drawn buggies, long a symbol of the Amish lifestyle, are finding less use as more people in Amish communities adopt electric-powered bicycles. In small Amish towns across America such as Sugarcreek, Ohio, Napponee…
... submission to the laws of society (George Berkeley, 1712): "And since the bond and cement of society is submission to its laws, it plai...
Snippets 2, Episode 22
Why Google's monopoly on search is a growing problem, from conflicts of interest to SEO manipulation, and why we desperately need a real competitor.
You ever notice that there's this funny threshold for getting to the front page on sites like HN? The exact threshold varies depending on how much traffic there is, but, for articles that aren't wildly popular, there's this moment when the article is at N-1 votes. There is, perhaps, a 60% chance that the vote will…
This opinion is a routine ruling over TOS formation and whether disputes must go to arbitration. However, before I dig into that question, I need to note the case’s chilling implications. * * * This case involves the Adult Friend...
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Previously in sequence and most on point: What is Success in an Immoral Maze?, How to Identify an Immoral Maze This post deals with the goal of avoiding or escaping being trapped in an immoral maze…
The ruler of Medieval Venice was chosen by an exceptionally complex ten-step process of alternating random lots and elections.
Art is not perception
I sometimes find myself asked to give advice on how organisations should go about creating software, but often my advice doesn’t gel with those who sought it. Sometimes that’s because only one answer was ever considered acceptable; sometimes I am ignorant of important wider context and my answer is unworthy of…
Fukushima 8 years on
Bid on the RGP-Domain discours.es. Bid now from €10 and secure the domain at an early stage!
We had a baby recently and my wife and I were online shopping for breast pumps. Our health insurance...
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid
I spend a lot of time working with monitoring solutions, and like to measure and track things. The information we collect from our apps tells us a lot about what’s going on. Who’s using it. How frequently they access it. Where they are from. How much time they spend accessing the app etc. And then…
The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke , a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports.
