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What to do if you’re stopped by the police
When I was 5, I saw the Karate Kid. I saw that bad guys could beat me up, and I had no recourse if I didn't know karate. I promptly signed up for martial arts classes.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 490 posts.
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The Most Abandoned Books on GoodReads (2019)
Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.
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Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
Persuasion is as old as our species. Both democracy and the market economy depend on it. Politicians persuade citizens to vote for them, or to support different policy positions. Businesses persuade consumers to buy their products or services. We all persuade our friends to accept our choice of restaurant, movie, and…
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Translation from VC-Backed PR Jargon to English of Magic Leap CEO Statement
“No one will remember us or anything we’ve done — unless Netflix makes one of those documentaries like the Fyre Festival one.”
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Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them
Chase Sunset & Vine, 2012. Painting by Alex Schaefer There is a fundamental asymmetry to banking. Banks don't like to share higher inte...
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Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
The long-time host of PBS NewsHour Jim Lehrer died this week at the age of 85. In this age of news as entertainment and opinion as news, Lehrer seems like one o
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A theory of Zoom fatigue
The Convivial Society: Dispatch No. 5
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Important women in CS who aren't Grace Hopper (2018)
I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace. Can’t we think of someone else for once? I went ahead and compiled a bunch of really important women according to some fairly arbitrary rules: There’s a specific thing you can point to and say “That. That’s their contribution.” This leaves…
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John Peel Sessions
Renowned Music Blogger, Dave Strickson, listens to some of the people that mattered in the history of music.
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How to effectively evade the GDPR and the reach of the DPA
Musings on Information Security and Privacy Risk Management - Thierry Zoller.
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Web Dark Ages
Old Web features — frontend and UI patterns
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Google Apple Contact Tracing (GACT): a wolf in sheep’s clothes?
I wrote a critical piece about the Google Apple Contact Tracing (GACT) platform a few days ago . This resulted in quite some discussion, which brought some more arguments to the fore, that I would like to address and clarify here. Here I focus on my area of expertise: privacy. My colleague Tamar Sharon wrote an…
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“This resentment runs deep and is stunningly widespread”
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opinion/apple-app-store-hey.html
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Concerns with that Stanford antibody study of coronavirus prevalence
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
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From context collapse to content collapse
When social media was taking shape fifteen-odd years ago, the concept of “context collapse” helped frame and explain the phenomenon. Young scholars like Danah Boyd and Michael Wesch, bu…
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The Amish health care system
I. Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them? A reminder: the Amish are a German religious sect who immigrated to colon…
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A Failure, but Not of Prediction
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
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On the destruction of America’s best high school
[C]hildren with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “eli…
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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser
In Denmark it is possible to register domains with funny characters such as æ, ø and å. And we do. One prominent example is our national portal for booking Covid-19 tests at https://coronaprøver.dk . Wikipedia calls these beasts Internationalised domain names , so they must indeed exist.
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Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
People in the bitcoin community often make fun of me as a nocoiner . That is, I don't have any bitcoins and am vocal about that fact. (Ne...
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RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
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Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports
The Japanese government seems incapable of getting their act together so that they can provide meaningful data to the public.
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The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon
Some of the world’s largest Internet firms have taken steps to crack down on disinformation spread by QAnon conspiracy theorists and the hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan . But according to a California-based security researcher, those seeking to de-platform these communities may have overlooked a simple legal…
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Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
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