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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 80 posts.
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Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
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Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool
It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any…
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Everything's broken and nobody's upset
Software doesn't work. I'm shocked at how often we put up with it. Here's just ...
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An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
The following article, and the two addenda that follow, were written by an investment manager who works with very wealthy clients. I knew him from decades ago, but in 2011 he e-mailed me with some concerns he had about what was happening with the economy. What he had to say was informative enough that I asked if he…
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What Amazon's ebook strategy really means
It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.
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Scroogled (2007)
Cory Doctorow wrote this Creative Commons-licensed fiction story for Radar Online magazine .
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$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog
This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is sa…
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Rick Falkvinge: Why free speech is harmed by the ban on child porn
Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring...
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Outlawed by Amazon DRM
Bekkelund.net er en blogg om teknologi, samfunn og politikk skrevet av Martin Koksrud Bekkelund
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Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices
The Software Freedom Law Center provides legal representation and other law related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software.
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Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons)
Excellent blog post by Valerie Aurora about sexual harassment at the DefCon hackers conference. Aside from the fact that this is utterly reprehensible behavior by the perpetrators involved, this is a real problem for our community. The response of “this is just what hacker culture is, and changing it will destroy…
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Malthusianisms
(See also: Umeshisms, Anthropicisms) Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,0…
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How Copyright Industries Con Congress
I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy, and so I haven’t bothered writing much about the absurd numbers the bill’s supporters routinely bandy about in hopes of persuading lawmakers that…
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Stanford researcher: Google Circumvents iOS Privacy protection in AdSense ads
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple's default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking. This tracking, discovered by Stanford...
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Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
Today, Google's services experienced a limited outage for about 27 minutes over some portions of the Internet. The reason this happened dives into the deep, dark corners of networking.
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AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
We’ve all heard the stories of seemingly trivial patents being used to mug technology companies. There was the patent on the “Interactive Web” which a troll named Eolas used to extract $521 million from Microsoft--until a jury in East Texas threw out the patents . There are the four patents Lodsys is using to send…
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Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
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OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple
Yesterday Apple launched iPhoto, its photo management app, for the iPad and iPhone… and we’re rather pleased to find they’re the latest to switch to OpenStreetMap.
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What killed the Linux desktop
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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Jack Daniels writes the politest cease and desist notice ever.
Learn why professors appreciate storytelling in essays and how students can use narrative techniques to write stronger academic papers. Practical tips and examples included.
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Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA
This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From source…
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Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
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The secret guild of Silicon Valley
A couple of weeks ago, I was drinking beer in San Francisco with friends when someone quipped: “You have too many hipsters, you won’t scale like that. Hire some fat guys who know C++.” It’s funny, but it got me thinking. Who are the “fat guys who know C++”, or as someone else put it, “theContinue reading "the secret…