Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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…
I probably wrote this page around 2000. At least, it must have been some point before Usenet was a complete ruin.
Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):
We should look for ways to make reading, publishing, and community services all play nicely together. I'm calling this model "the unbundled web," and I think RSS should be the primary method of interop.
Last week, the government announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, with Ministers Anita Anand, Gary Anandasangaree and Sean Fraser touting the treaty’s child protection provisions and human rights safeguards, which were described as “among the strongest found in an…
Another privacy nightmare. An airline wants its cabin crew to know your birthday and favourite drinks order, to better personalise its service to you. My first instinct is to recoil in horror. It sounds like every dystopian sci-fi epic. But why do I feel this way? Partly it is the lack of genuine personality behind…
The other week I spent some time visiting friends in San Francisco. I’ve been going to SF on and off every year for about ten years now. However on this journey, the weirdness of the city a…
David Coursey from Forbes has a nice article on Gates titled – How Can Anyone Still Hate Bill Gates?There were a couple of line in Coursey’s article that rang very true.All that money y…
Facebook is acquiring tbh, another burgeoning social network; regulators erred in allowing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, but there is no better place to start enforcing the law than now.
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.
It is a good time to be in tech right now: soaring salaries, daily LinkedIn recruiter spam, people bootcamping their way into career switches to tech, remote work allowing you to work for a major tech company making triple digit salaries from the beach. It really feels like every single company is trying to recruit…
Friendly and helpful customer support that goes above and beyond. We help you get the perfect domain name.
If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me , an online identity verification service that…
What China’s jet engine program tells us about the limits of industrial policy
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy-preserving by design. I mean, unless some administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built-in...
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
In 51,129 comments from six knife subreddits, the 5% most brand-heavy accounts wrote 11.3% of the brand mentions in buying threads, against 7.9% expected by chance. For one brand it is 31% against 8%. The full Reddit histories of those accounts are 4.5 years old and spread over 66 subreddits, the same as a comparison…
A follow up to The Ofcom Files. Some notes on Ofcom’s strategy to date. As many of you know, I represent the U.S. website 4chan, pro bono, in its U.S. federal lawsuit against the UK…
Reddit communities are still private in protest of new API rules. Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users. Users are frustrated but still using these sites.
