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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
An update for those of you that can't run my games anymore on OSX because of Catalina. I'm so sorry about this… I'll probably write a post about this, breaking it all down for you, but the situation is as follows. (from my point of view, and own experiences with Apple) [thread] pic.twitter.com/PY0y3o9gNF
Learn how Google kills competition through anti-competitive behavior. This is the true story of how I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with two of the former founders of Myspace between 2006-2008 on a startup called LiveVideo.com. Some old files I found related to LiveVideo.com: Automated Transcript: 00:05 You…
Yesterday Apple announced News+, “ an immersive magazine and news reading experience ”. This immersive experience is, for now, a US/Canada only product, with Apple noting: “Available in the US and Canada, Apple News+ presents the best and most relevant articles to meet any range of interests from renowned publications…
On the rise of newsletter production, consumption, and monetization, and how email is one of the most powerful and resilient publishing platforms.
I'm 35. Before Facebook, I had to use different tools depending on whom I wanted to chat with. I'm not talking about the early era of the Internet, but rather the period after everybody started getting online. Chat was just getting popular, but it
This blog post is about the NAACL 2019 paper What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments by Abigail See, Stephen Rolle...
Many times on this blog I've argued that the difference between pure and applied math is motivation. As my graduate advisor used to say, “Applied mathematics is not a subject classification. It's an attitude.” Traditionally there was general agreement regarding what is pure math and what is applied. Number theory and…
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
In this post, you'll find out more on the legal aspect of web scraping and crawling, and what possible consequences you might face.
Okay, folks. This is new territory for me. I'm stepping into the world of.... t h i n k p i e c e s...
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same…
Cripples and lovely women are both tired of being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves constantly being observed, they feel hemmed in; and...
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
Good evening and thank you all for coming. I want to use my time tonight to warn the world about an unprecedented danger that’s threatening the very survival of open societies. Last year when I stood before you I spent most of my time analyzing the nefarious role of the IT monopolies. This is what […]
Hi! Welcome to Big, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
Back in 1998, Tim May warned us of the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: “terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.” I tended to cast it slightly differently. This is me from 2005: Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers…
The First Amendment is not about a law, but rather a culture — specifically a culture of liberty. It is essential to tech, and in this context, Facebook is mostly right about political ads (but can…
We live in an era that devalues conformity, while simultaneously preserving it in many interesting ways. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Divergent views produce conflict, however, and disagreement, argument, and debate define our current moment. If we merely disagreed on matters of taste - our favorite color…
Question for Quote Investigator: The host of a video on YouTube mentioned a remarkably prescient quotation from a New York book dealer in the 1960s who predicted that telephones would have screens, and people would read books on those screens selected from a large electronic library. Would you please explore this…
If you time-traveled to the 1960s, or even the 1980s, and tried to describe smartphones to the people you met, they wouldn’t believe you.
