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The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)
I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. Predictably, the move caused …
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 85 posts.
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Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020cited by 42History & Retro Computing details
This week’s post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I’m going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we’ve…
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Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
Wikipedia's "NPOV" is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call "false balance."
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The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
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Your Computer Isn't Yours
There have been several updates appended to this page as of 2020-11-16, please see below. Also available in: Türkçe Français Español Português Português…
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Concerns with that Stanford antibody study of coronavirus prevalence
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
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Lab-made? CoV2 genealogy through the lens of gain-of-function research
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility (2010)
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
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Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored by the Intercept
An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept
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Emails With Intercept Editors Showing Censorship of My Joe Biden Article
Given The Intercept's vehement denials, readers are entitled to see for themselves what the truth is: transparency journalism with integrity requires.
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I Am Deleting the Blog
[EDIT 2/13/21: This post is originally from June 2020, but there’s been renewed interest in it because the NYT article involved just came out. This post says the NYT was going to write a posi…
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Software Disenchantment (2018)
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
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Resignation Letter
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
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Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and no…
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My Resignation from the Intercept
The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.
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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
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Archiving URLs (2019)
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
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The Guy I Almost Was (1998)
An online graphic novel about a young man's coming of age in the California cyberculture of the early 1990s.
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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Target didn’t figure out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did
And that one article that said they did was silly and bad
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Modeling a Wealth Tax
A wealth tax will usually have a threshold at which it starts. How much difference would a high threshold make? To model that, we need to make some assumptions about the initial value of your stock and the growth rate. Suppose your stock is initially worth $2 million, and the company's trajectory is as follows: the…
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The Internet of Beefs
You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming , right? It's a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is -- by design -- no…
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The Global Dollar Short Squeeze
Published February 2020 There is currently a short squeeze affecting most of the global economy, slowing its growth. This has been the case well before the impacts from the trade war and the coronavirus. A short squeeze occurs when something that is heavily shorted goes on to rise sharply in price for one reason or […]
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In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.