Best of 2008

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2008. 126 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
108

Debunking Daniel Tammet

Lately I've been encouraged to make more of my posts unlocked. I only do that under certain circumstances, but I feel this is an important occasion because I believe I have spotted a hoax and that I am unusually qualified to unmask it. I just watched The Boy With the Incredible Brain , a video that…

112

Rees Re: OO

(Jonathan Rees had a really interesting response to Why Arc isn't Especially Object-Oriented , which he has allowed me to reproduce here.) Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.

113

Raw Thought: Aaron Swartz's Weblog

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…

114

1,000 True Fans

This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →

116

Knuth: Recent News

Leading banks and investment funds have been foundering, because of bad debts and lack of trust; and other, less well-known kinds of fiscal chaos are also on the horizon. For example, due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write…