Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.
"Magic the Gathering: Online Exchange" has magically gathered all your online bitcoins and exchanged them for ... something or other. More here . For once, do read the comments —it's hysterically funny, in a sad way, to watch the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Content note for discussion of abuse and sexual violence. In the last couple of weeks, three respected members of the computer security and privacy tech communities have come forward under their ow…
Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city. San Francisco has tried, and will continue to try, to ban Airbnb in various ways....
I have a confession to make: I am a complete Bruce Schneier fanboy. I have been following the cryptographer, Harvard lecturer and privacy specialist for many years, and was delighted to meet him face-to-face at last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, where he gave a keynote (registration required) on how to…
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
Prompted by letters from three engineers, the author asks what remains for humans as AI takes over execution, naming judgment, taste, and derivation as irreplaceable, and warns against the erosion of subjecthood.
In the culture wars, hypersensitivity and accusations of ‘hate’ risk leading us into an Orwellian future
In the frenzy to attract venture capital funding and draw new users and investors into blockchain technologies, 'how will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?' is going unasked. While blockchain proponents speak about a 'future of the web' based around public ledgers, anonymity, and immutability, those…
Amazon is very proud of its "flywheel": at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the "everything…
The implicit contract — work hard, stay employed, build a life — is broken.
Can a new interactive movie shed some light on a strange disorder?
I offer "no economic boost," you receive "P(doom)"
Despite dropping out, Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg were immensely successful because of the alignment of many factors: connections (for elite universities, attending can be as valuable as graduating, due to connections), high IQ (which allowed them to get into such universities and be so successful at tech ), access to…
Last year, as an occasional contributor to the Rust project, I did not think much about the organisational structure of the team behind the project. I saw a hierarchy of teams and groups, team leaders, etc. Just like any other organisation. This year, after getting more involved, becoming a library team member and…
How did we get here? And how do we get back?
The fall of Facebook has nothing to do with people quitting the service…
There is a big banking reform bill working its way through the Senate right now. It is sponsored by Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. It has a long name I can't remember, so I'll call it the Dodd Banking Bill. What does a bill attempting to regulate the banking industry have to […]
I had the pleasure of stumbling upon the work of Michael Crow, Arizona State University’s president, earlier this year, and I so enjoyed his thoughts on knowledge production that I immediately wondered how his philosophy would translate to ASU as an organization. Turns out, President Crow was many steps ahead of me…
Media is all about profit margins . eHow was originally founded in 1998 & had $36 million in venture capital behind it. But the original cost structure was flawed due to high content costs. The site failed so badly that it was sold in 2004 for $100,000 . The original site owners had GoogleBot blocked. Simply by…
