Top all-time · #12294
G
Graeme's
Personal blog · pietersz.co.uk · on HN as graemeppoliticseconomics
Graeme's is a personal blog at pietersz.co.uk about politics and economics. Since 2008, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-11, and you can follow it by feed.
40mentions?
6HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked in Tcl and web server discussions as an example of a minimal HTTP server, dandelion-server, built with Tcl socket support. Comments cite it as a resource rather than judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /software/dandelion-server2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-26
What Hacker News says?
> Firstly, there's only one sentient primate race: Homo Sapiens. Nope, species, not race - or arguable sub-species. As your link says race is a social construct, so it is whatever society says it means. It means different things in different societies. This is something I experience personally so I am very aware of it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different > However, when genetic variation is compa…
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different
on “US High school students' scores fall in reading and math”Submitted Comparing Node.js with Tcl as a story · 67 points
HN discussionIn very few cases are you talking about a system as inefficient as funding R & D. It is not really an open market with competition: the government creates incentives, and only a faction of the increased cost to buyers goes into what the incentives are supposed to support. Any useful information from price signals is lost too amid bad incentives: https://pietersz.co.uk/2007/01/pharmaceutical-incentives-dev...
Comment linking /2007/01/pharmaceutical-incentives-development
on “Big Pharma spends billions more on executives and stockholders than on R&D”Submitted How to fix capitalism as a story · 17 points
HN discussionThe point is that most of that profit comes from government incentives that are supposed to encourage R & D. i.e. we pay several times more on drugs than we would without paying those incentives to the businesses, but only a small proportion of that extra money goes into R & D. Its incredibly inefficient funding. My take on that problem. There are others. https://pietersz.co.uk/2007/02/patents-inefficient I made the…
Comment linking /2007/02/patents-inefficient
on “Big Pharma spends billions more on executives and stockholders than on R&D”Submitted Why Democracy Will Die as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHer other book, Caste, was what made me understand American racism, and how it differed from racism in societies I knew. I strongly recommend it. i have a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different/
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different/
on “‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)”Submitted The net is easy to censor as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI love Isabel Wilkerson's book. It was that (through the comparison with caste) that gave me a clearer idea of the difference between what race is in American culture. I have posted this before so a bit reluctant to repeat, but its relevant. i wrote a blog post about my view and experience of race in different cultures : https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different
on “Sitters and Standers”Submitted Irrational philistine "education" has won as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCapitalism works fine under certain conditions: free markets, which implies competition. The problem is that these conditions do not always prevail. I used to think this was fixable: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/fix-capitalism I now think it is more complex and we need a mixed economy.
Comment linking /2009/11/fix-capitalism
on “CockroachDB license change”Submitted Are newspapers content farms as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat is true in any market, not just software. There is a large element of regulatory capture that shapes regulation to favour bigger businesses instead of reining them. Software and online services have been particularly bad because there are so many ways to work around regulation. Apple's current malicious compliance with the EU is an egregious one, but most are more subtle (FB persuading regulators to let them ta…
Comment linking /2009/11/fix-capitalism
on “Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation”They certainly can find things like patterns in numbers interesting. I just found a blog post I wrote when my daughter was a few weeks short of seven that says she found simple sequences interesting. "She was instantly fascinated, and thought that trying to figure out the rules of each sequence was a wonderful game. Whenever I ran out of ideas, she pestered me for more sequences." https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/10/scho…
Comment linking /2009/10/schools-maths-wron
on “How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments”I have long had ideas on those lines: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/fix-capitalism
Comment linking /2009/11/fix-capitalism
on “Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market”My kids started with desktops, and in family areas of the house. I did not go as far as getting something from the 1980s or teaching them to use the command line as toddlers, but they were second hand desktops running Linux. It was easier with the older one as phones and tablets were not as pervasive so I can understand it has become harder to do. I also think another thing that benefitted them greatly was that we d…
Comment linking /2008/05/i-have-no-tv/
on “Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers”Its not quite that. The US is also different from other countries with large non-white minorities. I think you are right that race, ethnicity and other things (such as caste) are much the same thing: you are classified by some group you are born into, and you and your descendants cannot move out of. However it is also different in every culture. It look me a long time to understand how the US is different from count…
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different
on “Peter Buxtun, whistleblower who exposed Tuskegee syphilis study, has died”Not as bad as my worst airBNB experience. Everything from rats to exposed wiring next to a shower! Review got removed. Full story here: https://pietersz.co.uk/2017/02/airbnb-block-bad-reviews
Comment linking /2017/02/airbnb-block-bad-reviews
on “Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode”In the UK, the racists would definitely prefer Russians over Filipinos. I can understand why this would be different in the Baltics! Its generally nothing to do with religion, apart from hostility to Islam. Its not hostility to non-Christians, its hostility to Muslims. What those sorts of people say about Muslims is very similar to what they said about Jews a 100 years ago, or about Catholics 200 years ago. Neither…
Comment linking /2026/10/christian-nationalism
on “Desire to Move Permanently to U.S. at New Low”> Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI. Except that we have thought similar things before. With the collapse of the Soviet Union people (in the west) thought that we had been through the great danger of nuclear war, and were set for a peaceful and prosperous future. SO much so that the idea of "the end of history" became extremely influential.…
Comment linking /2012/05/innovation-crisis
on “Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean”Classes for drama,music and dance and some sports. For GCSEs/IGCSEs (UK exams schools do at 16) English literature for older one. English language and literature for younger one. Its a hard subject to mark for exam prep. Close friend who was a teacher and briefly home educated her daughter for health reasons. Also classical civilisation for which I found a tutor through recommendations. A lot of teachers make bad tu…
Comment linking /category/life/parenting
on “Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'”I agree with you, but I think the problem, with regard to the US (I do not know about the rest of the Americas) is that they are victims of their history. While they can understand at an intellectual level that race is cultural construct, they cannot at other levels stop regarding race (rather than culture, language, etc.) as a essential and immutable part of people's identity. I have blogged about this compared to…
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different
on “Conquest of the Incas”This is a very silly comparison. There's a huge difference in terms of features and reliability between node's http module and this - http://pietersz.co.uk/software/dandelion-server I'm sure an equally minimal http implementation using the net module would match or beat that, but since you'd never use either of them in production, the results are meaningless.
Comment linking /software/dandelion-server
on “Comparing Node.js with Tcl”It is measurable, it improves the standard of living of those affected, and has other environmental benefits. On the measurable, the fact that some has found that the measures were wrong is encouraging. It can be monitored. When will we find out if tree planting offsets do not happen? Years or decades down the line. In this case I think it is probably fixable - obviously the new stoves are not as good from the users…
Comment linking /2023/03/co2-emissions-will-keep-rising
on “Global carbon markets overcredit cookstove greenhouse gas reductions by 10”> so books that when published were Anti-Racist, like To Kill A Mockingbird, can now be banned in places due to charges of Racism. What that shows is that some people are incapable of understanding anything from outside their own cultural context - they cannot understand the past or other cultures. This is a common problem with anything from the Bible to a contemporary work by a foreigner. Racism is, like race, a cu…
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different
on “How to Be Obscene (1927)”British culture is very different from US with regard to race. It took me a long time to understand what the difference was. In fact every culture I know (directly or am informed about) is different form the others. I wrote a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different I do not think people in the UK care about where immigrants are from, they care about whether they compete with the…
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different
on “Tougher rules for sellers of internet-enabled devices in the UK”I think this is the most probable explanation. Homeopathic medicine is based on the same principles as sympathetic magic. You might as well ask someone to cast a spell. https://pietersz.co.uk/2013/07/homeopathy-magic There have been similar problems with dilution of herbal medicines, but of course herbs do often have medicinal properties.
Comment linking /2013/07/homeopathy-magic
on “Leeches and the legitimizing of folk-medicine”One reason i prefer the term home education (it gets away from the idea it is like school - methods are very different). The term used historically in the UK (essentially when posh people did it with tutors, look up older biographies of the Queen!) was "private education". The way I think of it is that it is every form of education other than school. https://pietersz.co.uk/2021/01/there-is-no-home-education
Comment linking /2021/01/there-is-no-home-education
on “Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education”> Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet. Where are you? It makes a big difference. I am talking primarily about the UK, where I have lived in different areas and know a variety of people in many different places. It is, in my experience, a society where racism is relatively rare: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
Comment linking /2023/08/racism-culture-different
on “Nothing works and everyone is euphoric”No, its very different because kids do not receive their enire education at that one location, nor do they have to stick to their age group ragardless of their abilities and interests. Its not new either. Most home educators use a mixture of ways of learning. The best is self teaching because it teaches study skills - learning how to learn is invaluable. It us also very flexible. For thise familiar with the British…
Comment linking /2023/08/schools-failing-flexible-answer
on “For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching”