Top all-time · #2158
Mandy Brown
Personal blog · aworkinglibrary.comwritingcareer
Mandy Brown writes A Working Library, a personal blog at aworkinglibrary.com about writing and career. Since 2010, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 50 times, most often “Accountability sinks”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
A working library is a project about work, reading & technology by mandy brown.
Most-linked posts?
- Accountability sinks11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2024-10-19
- Coming Home3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-28
- Artificial intelligence is not a technology2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-30
- A Unified Theory of Fucks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-26
- Designed to Be Specialists2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-02-19
- Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we've made of that word2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-13
What Hacker News says?
"Accountability Sinks" https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues”Submitted Accountability sinks as a story · 517 points
HN discussionhttps://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon”Submitted Against Optimization as a story · 21 points
HN discussionVisa, Mastercard, payment processors, banks, etc act as accountability sinks[0] for governments and political group by design . They are arbiters for moving/blocking money, not taking principled stances; there is no net neutrality equivalent for financial networks. There's a lot of wasted discussion talking about an intentional design decision because they're arguing from consumers' perspectives, ignoring the huge b…
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship”Submitted A Unified Theory of Fucks as a story · 10 points
HN discussionRelated discussion (517 pts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694 https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/unaccountability-machine (A very short overview of Dan Davies' book, quoted in TFA, that came up with the term) EDIT: complementing book mentioned in that thread Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin Random House) is a good companion to this concept, covering the "accountability sink"…
Comment linking /reading/unaccountability-machine
on “Accountability Sinks”Submitted A Unified Theory of Fucks as a story · 7 points
HN discussionDan Davies wrote a whole book on this topic, The Unaccountability Machine [1]. In it, he creates the concept of "accountability sinks": organisational structures or systems which abstract the source of a decision away from individuals so that no specific person can be held accountable. Davies writes: "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affecte…
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Blame as a Service”Submitted Legalese as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAccountability sinks are a huge issue with large corporations. The people you can reach are not allowed to act due to policies and processes, and the people setting the policies are not reachable to a regular customer - nor would they change the policies just to accommodate one out of their millions of users https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “The dark side of account bans”Submitted Artificial intelligence is not a technology as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe most maddening part about this experience is the helplessness. Its inconvenient, sure. Ive been late because of traffic, etc. Being carried along well beyond my will without a breakglass: Fine, I'll just walk! option makes my skin crawl. Events like this seem to only be explained by accountability sink[0]. Naming it gives me some brief sense of sanity. I appreciate that there is a safety concern; where's the hum…
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn”Submitted Making a Career in Dictatorship as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMandy Brown from A Working Library had a great blog post on this to emphasize your point: http://aworkinglibrary.com/library/archives/on_audience/ .
Comment linking /library/archives/on_audience/
on “My Experience as a Single Founder”Submitted Reading Matters Deeply as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think my problem with codes of conduct is that, in my experience, they're usually just accountability sinks[1]. e.g. "all violations must be reported to the committee" => "we will forbid anyone taking action without the committee's prior approval, and insist that disclosing any reports to us is a violation of policy, then refuse to take any action on reports". So a thing that was supposed to explicitly communicate…
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Eric S. Raymond to the OSS community on codes of conduct: Refuse to have one”Submitted Toolmen as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGonna recommend folks read https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/you-deserve-a-tech-union Very much believe that unions, and power to the workers, are very important!
Comment linking /reading/you-deserve-a-tech-union
on “When will tech workers start creating Unions?”Submitted The Case for Rereading as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPOSIWID [0] and Accountability Sinks [1] territory, I'm sure LLMs will become the beating hearts of corporate systems designed to do something profitably illegal with deniability. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... [1] https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs”Submitted You keep using that word as a story · 3 points
HN discussion>In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to che…
Comment linking /writing/accountability-sinks
on “Claude Is Not Your Architect. Stop Letting It Pretend”Submitted Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we've made of that word as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Accountability Sinks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Toolmen as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Make Life Possible as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Storytelling as Practice as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What are we making together? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Coming Home as a story · 2 points
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