How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F.
A mother discovers that her autistic son, Gus, has become inseparable from the voice emanating from her iPhone.
ffs ssl -- wingolog
I just set up SSLTLS on my web site. Everything can be had via https://wingolog.org/, and things appear to work. However the process of transitioning even a simple web site to SSL is so clownshoes bad that it's amazing anyone ever does it. So here's an incomplete list of things that can go wrong whe…
Backstabbr
The web's most modern interface for playing Diplomacy online, compatible with all modern smart phones and tablets.
On Error Handling in Rust | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Rust is improving quite a lot lately and it makes it very exciting to play with the language and see how good API design could look like. There are areas in it however that are a bit frustrating still. For me one area is error handling. But some improvements might be coming up which I find quite exc…
Hasnain says:
Why I need to learn Rust pt 2. Really loving the ? operator idea.
Posted on 2014-10-17T04:35:32+0000
How Text Messages Change from Dating to Marriage
Way back in October 2008, my now husband and I went on our first date. On our one year anniversary, his gift to me was a Word doc of all of our text messages since our first date (what he likes to ...
Hasnain says:
This is some really cool data. And, from the top HN comment:
"> more recently I seem to have decided to no longer greet my husband
This is the most interesting part. When you're dating someone, there are defined parts of the day where you start-and-then-stop interacting with them, so there are greetings exchanged, etc. When you're married (or in a very steady relationship), it's more like one continuous conversation; since it never ends, it never has to begin again."
Posted on 2014-10-17T04:34:16+0000
Dirty medicine
The epic inside story of long-term criminal fraud at Ranbaxy, the Indian drug company that makes generic Lipitor for millions of Americans.
Hasnain says:
How the hell are these guys still in business and printing money instead of being in jail?
"Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid.
Ranbaxy executives didn’t care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. “Who cares?” he said, according to Spreen. “It’s just blacks dying.”"
Posted on 2014-10-17T04:25:49+0000
When Women Become Men At Wellesley College
Can women’s colleges survive the transgender movement?
Hasnain says:
Really long, really engrossing read.
"“It’s this very bizarre reversal of what happens in the real world,” Kaden said. “In the real world, it’s women who get fetishized, catcalled, sexually harassed, grabbed. At Wellesley, it’s trans men who do. If I were to go up to someone I just met and touch her body, I’d get grief from the entire Wellesley community, because they’d say it’s assault — and it is. But for some reason, when it’s done to trans men here, it doesn’t get read the same way. It’s like a free pass, that suddenly it’s O.K. to talk about or touch someone’s body as long as they’re not a woman.”"
Posted on 2014-10-16T21:36:34+0000
Copywrong
Why have copyright protections grown and grown? Louis Menand on what the intellectual-property battles really mean.
Hasnain says:
"Cultural consumers are not organized at all. They can speak only through their elected representatives, but most of those people will be listening to the money—to the lobbyists for the content industries, new and old, as those industries search for more reliable ways to squeeze profits from the awesome stuff that human beings have created."
Posted on 2014-10-16T21:29:44+0000
Why Inequality Matters
Bill Gates reviews Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
Hasnain says:
This is a great analysis.
"The debate over wealth and inequality has generated a lot of partisan heat. I don’t have a magic solution for that. But I do know that, even with its flaws, Piketty’s work contributes at least as much light as heat. And now I’m eager to see research that brings more light to this important topic."
Posted on 2014-10-16T17:15:44+0000
At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law | Quanta Magazine
A potent theory has emerged explaining a mysterious statistical law that arises throughout physics and mathematics.
Hasnain says:
This is really really interesting; a new distribution that seems to be appearing everywhere.
Posted on 2014-10-16T16:43:37+0000