The Real Problem with Waiting for Superman
Waiting for “Superman” , in case you haven’t heard, is the hot new film from Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim. While his last film capitalized on liberal guilt over destroying our planet (and maybe voting for Ralph Nader?), “Superman” (yes, the film is weirdly insistent on those unnecessary quotation…
Hacker News and pseudonymity
Mark Suster has a post about improving civility on YCombinator’s Hacker News: I’ve seen vitriolic responses on HN on several occasion. I mostly get hammered on HN if I writ…
Stop Words as Social Signals (a result that goes against IR common knowledge)
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HN long term change
HN visitors are generally worried that HN is changing, and most of the worries center (obviously) around whether or not it is changing for the worse.
Google did something seriously wrong
Here's what happened. When Google rolled out Buzz last week they activated an unknown number of users and chose people for them to follow automatically based on who they email most frequently with. Presumably these people had to also be on Gmail. And the list of people you follow is public. Therefore the list of…
LiveJournal stripping users' affiliate links
LiveJournal has done something stupid again. Let me rephrase that: LiveJournal has done something REALLY fucking stupid. Links to about 150 e-commerce sites that users post to their LiveJournals are being redirected through a 3rd party website. These redirected links also open in a new window.…
A Censorship-Resistant Web
Imagine someone put a document up at http://pentagonpapers.com/volumes/1.html that a) some people want to read and b) some people want to keep you from reading.
Schneier on Security: Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start
China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further. Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to…
The Stock Market Is Still for Suckers
I wrote a whole series of articles warning people about the stock market over the years. You can see them here . It’s gotten worse. So I thought i would write some more about why you should probably avoid putting any new money into the stock market…
Hope You Enjoy the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (Apple vs. Google)
On the growing sense that Apple is gearing up for war against Google.
Unhosted - Freedom from web 2.0's monopoly platforms
This website describes a technology, unhosted web apps, which we find so important that some of us quit our day jobs and other spend their evenings and weekends to work for the higher goal of free technology, not just as a job that pays the bill. Why do we work for free? Why are unhosted web apps so important? Why…
Things I Learned Eating On $1 A Day For A Month
Learn what 10 lessons one writer took away from eating on $1 a day for a month, and use the real-world insights to plan your own food budget challenge.
A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques
On Tuesday of this week someone posted the following question to the Hacker News website: How long has Mahalo been using keyword domains like this? The link in the story points to a search in Google, [inurl:tip_guidelines mahalo]. The results of this query show a list of somewhere between 180 and 270 sites (Google…
Why is computer science a sausage fest?
Usually I avoid topics like women in technology because (1) it is a can of worms, and (2) I can really only speak for myself. For the most part, I’d rather be seen as a person in technology than a woman, but this weekend the twitterverse erupted with opinions about Google sponsoring female students to attend JSConf …
Vaccines don't cause autism
The debate is essentially over and the final word is in: vaccines do not cause autism. The results of a rigorous study conducted over several years were just an