Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 453 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
4

Enough Is Enough

I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation. And software is closer to media than it is to hardware. Patenting software is like patenting music. The mess around the Lodsys patents should be a wake up call to everyone involved in the patent business (government bureaucrats…

20

Kind of Screwed

TL;DR version: Last year, I was threatened with a lawsuit over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop. Despite my firm belief that I was legally in the right, I settled out of court to cut my losses. This ordeal was very nerve-wracking for me and my family, and I’ve had trouble writing […]

29

Why Arabic is Terrific

I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute…