2731
Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)
Why do some English plurals end in "en" instead of "s"?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
2732
The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic
Anthropic faces a Friday deadline to allow domestic surveillance and automated killer robots.
2733
2734
I kissed comment culture goodbye
It started out harmlessly, a comment on hacker news roughly 16 years ago.
2735
Giving university exams in the age of chatbots
Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
2736
Money Laundering and AML Compliance
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
2737
The internet has made defensive writers of us all
I was struck by this passage in Steven Pinker’s article about why academics’ writing stinks :
2738
Senators Urge FTC to Probe ID.me over Selfie Data
Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for “deceptive statements” the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service …
2739
How Much Does it Cost to Climb Mount Everest?
alanarnette.com is a site covering big mountain climbing including Everest, K2, and the 7 summits. All based on Alan's experience including Everest in 2011 and the oldest American at 58 to summit K2 in 2014.
2740
Bad Dye Job
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
2741
Schroedinger's streaming service just died
The sex industry has pioneered every new communications tool since the printing press: in my own lifetime, I've watched it take the lead in VCRs, desktop publishing, BBSes, digital text, digital images, digital videos, live streaming services, cryptocurrency, and VR. It would be easy to conclude that being interested…
2742
2743
More on Anthropic's Scion ripping off Mononoke
Answering questions and concerns.
2744
When “Dumb Pipes” Get Too Smart
I wrote this in 2012, when CloudFlare (an almost awkwardly popular CDN) introduced a bug into websites they hosted using some of their "advanced features" via injected JavaScript that managed to not just break the website but lock up entire web browers by tickling a scheduler starvation bug in WebCore. This issue was…
2745
Aaron Swartz: What Happens in The Dark Knight
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
2746
Running a Law Firm on Linux
We are now three or so months into the world of running decoded.legal, and doing legal work, exclusively* on Linux 1 , so I thought I’d write about it.
2747
Apology
After talking to two team members who recalled our staff meeting at the 2018 Racket Summer School better than I did, I think I can put myself into your shoes now.
2748
What the Goddamn Hell Is Going on in the Tech Industry?
Sweet merciful Jesus, I woke up this morning and my inbox was flooded with horrific stories about how employers treat people. I knew things were fucked, but this was so much worse than I imagined, and that's not even getting into the comments on Hackernews. I am going to dig into some of those emails, but first...
2749
USA Temperature: can I sucker you?
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., als…
2750
How to build a small town in Texas
Of all the questions I get on Twitter the most common is this: “How do you build a town?” We know how it used to be done, but these last two centuries we have forgotten how to do it.
2751
2752
Global Intelligence Crisis
A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future
2753
Dear USA, my data has left your building
NSA, GCHQ, Prism, FISA, Project Bullrun, Sigint. After Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA employee, started revealing how massively, intensely and easily we are all being spied upon by the intelligence agencies of various governments, the terms above have suddenly been spending a great deal more time in the media…
2754
2755
The War On RSS
John Gruber was right, when pointing to Dan Frakes’ review of the Mail app in Mountain Lion, to highlight the fact that the application drops support for RSS (he calls it an “interesting omission”, which is both correct and understated). It is indeed the most interesting aspect of the review, even though it’s buried…
2756
AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2
Some (well-known) consequences of AI automating work
2757
2758
Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers
From the moment I started paying attention to the tech industry, Paul Graham was there. My first job out of college was in SoMa, around the corner from the Justin.tv offices, and his essays were just floating around in the ether, impossible to ignore. His popularization of Lisp was a small part of why I tried Clojure…
2759
2760
On the death of my family's dairy farm
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on.