I recently signed up for some utilities for my house and a form button wasn’t working. It was a pretty basic form, I turned off ad-block to see if some traffic was being blocked or some other network error.

Well that didn’t fix the button, but it did reveal a call every 2 seconds to the Facebook tracker service. Figures…

• Gateway: For some late payoff, hard sci-fi content, I like Frederik Pohl quite a lot. His stuff is between classic and contemporary, and balances technology with sophisticated plot and characters. I greatly enjoyed reading his Gateway series this year, could be one of my favorites.

• Mass Effect: I was pleasantly surprised with Mass Effect: Andromeda Annihilation. I moderately enjoyed the Mass Effect video game series, and thought this companion novel could tank, but it was actually a really fun read, with great characters and immersion. The plot is orthogonal to the main plot points of the video games, rather than extensions of them, which I thought gave it breathing room for novel ideas.

Hacker news still going strong, you get the drama stories here and there but the focus is on the technology