Top all-time · #3583
James Grimmelmann
Personal blog · laboratorium.netculturepolitics
James Grimmelmann writes The Laboratorium (3d ser.), a personal blog at laboratorium.net about culture and politics. Since 2009, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “As Flies to Wanton Boys”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link James Grimmelmann's blog for legal and technology analysis, such as copyright cases on Google Books, Zediva and Aereo, and ethics of Facebook and OkCupid experiments. It also has an obituary and a keyboard-layout note.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog by James Grimmelmann.
Most-linked posts?
- As Flies to Wanton Boys4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-06-29
- /archive/2011/03/16/that_zediva_thing_its_so_not_going_to_work3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-05-11
- /archive/2008/04/28/a_few_facts_about_the_lgp302 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-09
- The Laboratorium: Inside Judge Chin's Opinion2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-23
- The Laboratorium : Aaron Swartz, Was 262 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-01-13
What Hacker News says?
> Those are the keys on the right side of the home row. Why would you want that alongside numbers which are either two rows up or to the side? Unless the keyboard was something like USPS’s which has numbers as an alternate mode on the home row, and thus made this layout sensible? But that would still make it a quirk of the system. Edit: yeah it was absolutely a quirk of the LPG-30, per a sibling comment: http://labo…
Comment linking /archive/2008/04/28/a_few_facts_about_the_lgp30
on “The Story of Mel (1983)”Submitted The Laboratorium : Aaron Swartz, Was 26 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI found this [0] which says that the layout of the LGP-30 Flexowriter (linked in the article) conformed to fgjkqw, so it may be related. [0] http://laboratorium.net/archive/2008/04/28/a_few_facts_about...
Comment linking /archive/2008/04/28/a_few_facts_about_the_lgp30
on “The Story of Mel (1983)”Submitted The Google Books settlement is now all but dead in light of new ruling as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAcademic research isn't some magic word that you just need to invoke, particularly when it involves personal data. You need specific informed consent and the sign-off from an ethics committee on your study plan. To not ask that of someone pretending to use your data for academic research is willful ignorance. Of course, we are talking about Facebook, who have literally been in the news before for themselves running…
Comment linking /archive/2014/06/28/as_flies_to_wanton_boys
on “Facebook's PR feels broken”Submitted Aspen doesn't want you to own your own casebooks as a story · 3 points
HN discussionJames Grimmelmann follows this style when writing obituaries; here's his obituary for Aaron. http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_...
Comment linking /archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_26
on “Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died”Submitted The Laboratorium: Inside Judge Chin's Opinion as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think it's more about this: http://laboratorium.net/archive/2014/06/28/as_flies_to_wanto...
Comment linking /archive/2014/06/28/as_flies_to_wanton_boys
on “U.S. senators introduce social media bill to ban 'dark patterns' tricks”Submitted The Laboratorium : Speech Engines (re Google) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Consent to "rank posts based on unknown criteria to maximize relevance" will incidentally, at least on some occasions, cause "emotional manipulation" in the consumers of the feed. Why is that automatically the case and how would the user know that? > So again, consent is already provided for the possibility of emotional manipulation. Giving consent for one specific form of emotional manipulation does not give blan…
Comment linking /archive/2014/06/28/as_flies_to_wanton_boys
on “Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)”Submitted My Career as a Bulk Downloader as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere’s a bunch of legal precedent - Zediva, Redd Horne, Aereo, Professional Real Estate Investors, etc. http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/16/that_zediva_thing... I’m in the middle of writing to the EFF to see if they would clarify if this pertains to non-profit educational organizations employees/volunteers. E.g. if an organization of researchers are providing educational information about games, can they pri…
Comment linking /archive/2011/03/16/that_zediva_thing_its_so_not_going_to_work
on “Feds: You Don't Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books”Submitted My Career as a bulk downloader as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA few observations: 1. There are well-settled copyright principles that hold a viewing event to be a "public performance" even though a single person only is doing the viewing at any given time. A leading case involved a video-store owner who owned one copy of each film he had in stock and who set up private viewing rooms in his establishment in which he allowed a patron to view a film privately that the patron had…
Comment linking /archive/2011/03/16/that_zediva_thing_its_so_not_going_to_work
on “BMI: one person listening to his own music via the cloud is public performance”Submitted New twists on old protocols: with Telex, everything is topsy-turvy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat sounds exactly like an idea I had for a video rental service. I was thinking of having a virtual DVD drive connected to remote DVD's and renting things out for 48 hour time periods. Granted, I assumed you would be sued but I am currious why they lost. After looking into it you would either be making copy's of the content or have DMCA issues but this seems to come down to public preforamance issues. Edit: On sec…
Comment linking /archive/2011/03/16/that_zediva_thing_its_so_not_going_to_work
on “Federal court to order film service Zediva shut down”Submitted Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJames Grimmelmann's got an excellent analysis of the Google Books opinion at http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chin...
Comment linking /archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chins_opinion
on “Six Reasons Google Books Failed”Submitted The AP Will Sell You a "License" to Words It Doesn't Own as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWe changed the url from http://laboratorium.net/archive/2014/09/23/facebook_and_okcu... , which points to this longer piece.
Comment linking /archive/2014/09/23/facebook_and_okcupids_experiments_were_illegal
on “Facebook and OkCupid Broke the Law When They Experimented on Users”Submitted As Flies to Wanton Boys as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Simple Distinction That Will Completely Change How You Think About Upworthy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Sabotage of Do Not Track as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Orphan Wars as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Samuelson on legislative alternatives to the Google Books settlement as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted About That Open Internet Thing as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
