Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 302 posts.
Around this time last year, I wrote a post dissecting the decline of The Simpsons from its peak in the mid 90s finding that the golden age of the show spanned an incredible 214 episodes. As a comparison, Friends, which seemed to have been on TV forever, managed 236 episodes...
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
A group of high school friends has been playing an elaborate game of tag since reconnecting at a reunion almost 30 years ago. A few years ago, one of the player
Based on new research published today by BEUC’s Norwegian member Forbrukerrådet, seven consumer groups are filing complaints against Google with their national data protection authorities.
This is a new thing for me - I'm hosting a blog post by a colleague/friend - James Tanton. You can find James' original post here. One reason it's being re-hosted here is because Medium is apparently blocked in some countries: Egypt Malaysia ..... possibly others. It is astounding to me that mathematics - of all…
I. I got Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or…
I discovered the existence of Lars Svendsen thanks to a forum discussion about - of all things - the modern apparel industry. One of the comments mentioned in passing his "Fashion: A Philosophy" and the idea of someone writing a philosophical analysis of Fashion intrigued me… so I checked out the book on Amazon. In…
Holy smokes: For the full Twitter experience on Mac, visit Twitter on web. ???? https://t.co/fuPJa3nVky — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 16, 2018 I’m glad Twitter got rid of all of the Nazis and Russian bots on their platform before this.
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
Flattr improves customer privacy protections by automatically deleting collected data when its no longer needed for its core service.
Important article slash rant about the recent story involving Linus Torvalds and his behavior in the Linux kernel development circles, the subsequent apology, the fallout, and the disturbing implications and ramifications of the whole affair on the long-term survival of Linux as a whole
Ok, enough bickering and fighting.
I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously…
Examining the history of Android explains why the European Commission may be right to fine Google for its actions around Android, even as the reasoning feels off.
The American Community Survey collects data on the college majors of people who’ve graduated college. This excellent data has lots of untapped potential for family research, because it tells …
Should software engineers unionize? I can’t give a simple answer to this. There are advantages and disadvantages to enrolling in a collective bargaining arrangement. If the disadvantages didn…
Cryptocurrencies, Public Goods & the State Late last year, I and a colleague from HKS were meeting with a VC I’d gotten to know in San Francisco. As an opening salvo in the conversation, the VC…
In the last few days I've been fortunate to witness an interesting chapter in the Internet's history, and I'm trying to compile a timeline of what has happened while the memories are still reasonably fresh. This is incomplete and a work in progress; I'll be updating it, and n...
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not…
What happens when a society with a penchant for the cosmetic meets a medium dominated by it? “The medium is the message.” Or so goes the famous saying from media scholar Marshall McLuhan, widely re…
Paper presented at the 14 th Rhodes Forum: Dialogue of Civilisations Research Institute, Panel 2: Economic Alternatives when Conventional Models Fail, Rhodos, Greece, on 1 October 2016
United reportedly has an effort to go after customers specifically that utilize Skiplagged to fly hidden city itineraries on the airline. In one case they're demanding payment of over $3000 and threatening to shut down the member's frequent flyer account and ban then from the airline. They are also threatening to send…
There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological…
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 April 2018. I’m not one to collect inspirational slogans, but here’s one I like: “Judge the value of what you have by what you had to giv…
After he retired from making feature length films in 2013, legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki started work on a short film using CGI animation techniques, which
