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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 415 posts.
This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…
Today, the European Parliament ordered new legislation to regulate credit card companies' ability to refuse service. This regulation follows the unilateral and rightless cutoff...
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
Crossposted on Naked Capitalism I just finished reading Nate Silver’s newish book, The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t. The good news First off…
Usually when I speculate about the future, I stick to two areas; either the really near future (within the next couple of decades), or the really far future (so far out that signs of continental drift should be glaringly obvious). But what about the medium term?
Back to: A writing experiment I plan to try | Forward to: PSA: Amazon order cancellations
Let’s get something straight: This is not a Facebook hate post. That being said, I’m running a little experiment of disabling my Facebook account. Why you ask? I first joined Facebook t…
The Guardian reported the other day on the London 2012 Olympics branding police who ensure that words like London, 2012 or Games aren't be...
This is the first post of probably several in my concern about textmining. You do NOT have to be a scientist to understand the point with total clarity. This topic is one of the most important I have written about this year. We are at a critical point where unless we take action our scholarly rights will be further…
Back when the web was only a limited affair and the most exciting thing on it in the realm of imagery was the ‘coffee pot webcam’ I came up with a way to make a real live video stream that worked in a browser. A few months earlier I’d made a very basic version of this using ftp upload of images to a server and then a…
Lesson 6 includes my “Amazon River” technique, in which I show students how I use a couple of useful bits of Amazon’s website software and the Amazon database to figure out how to find alternative genres for their books if they aren’t having any luck selling it in the genre they wrote it for. I’ve successfully used…
You may remember The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and it argued that IQ is largely determined by genetics and little by the environment. It...
A story about Facebook went around twitter last night that provoked quite a reaction in privacy advocates like me: Facebook, it seems, is experimenting with getting people to ‘snitch’ o…
I don't remember seeing this before at the bottom of the Craigslist posting form. I'm guessing this is the result of the Padmapper debacle?...
One of my commenters reports that he showed my essay on evaluating the harm from closed-source software to Richard Stallman, who became upset by it. It shouldn’t be news to RMS or anyone else that I think he’s a fanatic and this is a problem, but it seems that every few years I have to explain the problem again. I…
The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This...
