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“It’s Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission”
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,213 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
692
I was wrong, we need crypto
To say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010s, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose: Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the…
693
To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…
694
Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment
Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr) You can read what you probably came here for at archive.org But if you’ll allow me first: Bringing people together is my life’s work. The text that was originally …
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What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of
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The Market for Lemons
New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?
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The Villain of CRISPR
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story:
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FBI agent accidentally reveals own 8chan posts
Updated August 4, 2019: Added link to “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded ‘Army’ To Terrorize Young War Dissidents” The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal governme…
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Culturally transmitted skills and values
Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we're on the same page (if you think that I should be using a different word for the concept, feel free to mentally…
703
Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
704
The US Intelligence Community has a Third Leaker
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
705
Michael Lewis: shilling for the buyside?
Journalism, in the ideal world, is supposed to inform the citizenry of facts important to their well being. Modern journalism seems to involve issuing press releases from the oligarchical reptiles …
706
The 1% fallacy
Here is how to make a fortune writing software: Pick a large and established software market e.g. back-up, anti-virus or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Write a new product for tha…
707
An investigation into egg prices
'More hens, less income!' So said the United Egg Producers' economist Donald Bell in 1994. The industry has gotten more consolidated ever since. And avian flu is just the latest excuse to hike prices.
708
The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
709
Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.
This is a story about how the VPS provider Digital Ocean required me to either delete a blog post or make it anonymous by removing any reference to the person I was writing about. If I refused to d…
710
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
711
My Favorite Liar (2008)
[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]
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Rsync and outrage
I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…
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Wrestling With Inclusion at LambdaConf
How far is too far when it comes to including people with different beliefs?
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Permacomputing
By Devine Lu Linvega
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Universal's Audible Watermark (2012)
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone. Update, April 8, 2013: Can you hear it? Take the watermark listening test. Update, January 14, 2015: Check out the results of the listening test. A while ago, I wrote about my confusion regarding Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns…
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Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)
(en Español) (auf Deutsch) (in het nederlands) “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We…
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A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system (2013)
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …