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Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 378 posts.
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Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap
The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality–Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their cur…
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Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine (2001)
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
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Making art with SSH key randomart
SSH is everywhere in the development or operations world now. For development it’s what allows you to push to GitHub. For operations it’s what allows you to reasonably securely log into Linux servers.
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Generate ASCII RFC-like header diagrams for your own custom protocols
Protocol is a command-line tool to display ASCII RFC-like protocol header diagrams for both existing network protocols or user-defined ones (using a very simple syntax). Protocol is written in Python and it's open-source software.
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MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted
Background This is a follow-up from an earlier post, “Stablecoins are doomed to fail,” from December 10th. I’ll keep this one short. Long have I been a critic of the “stable…
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History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007)
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
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Why I’m done with Chrome
This blog is mainly reserved for cryptography, and I try to avoid filling it with random “someone is wrong on the Internet” posts. After all, that’s what Twitter is for! But from …
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LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for All Major U.S. Carriers in Real Time
On May 16th, I found a vulnerability in the LocationSmart website which allowed anyone, with no prior authentication or consent, to obtain the realtime location of any cellphone in the US to within…
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Dumber phone
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…
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Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
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Oracle’s Java 11 trap
TL:DR; Java is still available at zero-cost , you just need to stop using Oracle JDK and start using an OpenJDK build, such as this one o...
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Beginner's guide to longevity research
A beginner's guide to longevity research
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First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?
Firefox’s FPI system keeps websites from tracking your movements across websites. This gives excellent privacy protections but at a cost of web compatibility.
233
The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late?
If you, like me, frequently commute via public transit, you may be familiar with the following situation:
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Have I Been Pwned Is Now Partnering with 1Password
The penny first dropped for me just over 7 years ago to the day: The only secure password is the one you can't remember [https://www.troyhunt.com/only-secure-password-is-one-you-cant/]. In an era well before the birth of Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.
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Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
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Deconstructing the Water Effect in Super Mario Sunshine
Note: The demos below require WebGL2 support . If you are running a browser without WebGL 2 support, user “petercooper” on Hacker News has helpfully recorded a video and GIFs and for me.
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Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction
The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and…
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Elm 0.19 Broke Us
Elm 0.19 was released yesterday. There were a significant number of breaking changes at every level:...
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Escaping Hell with Monads (2017)
As programmers we occasionally find ourselves in “Programmer’s Hell”, where our regular abstractions fail to satisfactory solve certain recurrent problems.
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An opinionated guide to Haskell
For me, this month marks the end of an era in my life: as of February 2018, I am no longer employed writing Haskell. It’s been a fascinating two years, and while I am excitedly looking forward to what I’ll be doing next, it’s likely I will continue to write Haskell in my spare time. I’ll probably even write it again…