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The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 810 posts.
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Russia's “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model
Russia's propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it does not commit to consistency.
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You Might Not Need Redux
People often choose Redux before they need it. “What if our app doesn’t scale without it?” Later, developers frown at the indirection Redux…
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What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?
What happens when you only invest at the peaks of the market by being the world's worst market timer.
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Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2016, at Web Camp Zagreb [ video ] (45 mins)
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The Trouble with Tor
The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for "the onion router" and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays where each relay only knows the next hop, not the ultimate destination.
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I, Pencil (1958)
Library of Economics and Liberty2016214 points162 commentscited by 28Society, Policy & Culture details
I am a lead pencil–the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write…. [From “I, Pencil”]
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Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’…
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Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Love Debugging)
Let's start with the punchline. Your bash scripts will be more robust, reliable and maintainable if you start them like this:
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The Difficulty of Private Contact Discovery
Building a social network is not easy. Social networks have value proportional to their size, so participants aren’t motivated to join new social networks which aren’t already large. It’s a paradox where if people haven’t already joined, people aren’t motivated to join. The trouble is that whi...
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World Population Growth
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
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Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
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Child and Infant Mortality
Child mortality remains one of the world’s largest problems and is a painful reminder of work yet to be done. With global data on where, when, and how child deaths occur, we can accelerate efforts to prevent them.
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Reflections: The ecosystem is moving
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
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Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)
Michael Isard, Derek Murray, and I recently sent in a HotOS submission (it’s not blind, so no harm talking about it, we think). The subject is hinted at from...
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The Error Model in Midori
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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Economics of Nuclear Power
Nuclear power is cost competitive with other forms of electricity generation, except where there is direct access to low-cost fossil fuels. In assessing the economics of nuclear power, decommissioning and waste disposal costs are fully taken into account.
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Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?
False positives cause many promising detection technologies to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack true positives are targets successfully attacked, while false positives are those that are attacked but yield nothing. This allows us to view the attacker’s…
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We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews
We built software to mask gender in technical engineering interviews. See what we learned and why it matters.
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Storage Pod 6.0: Building a 60 Drive 480TB Storage Server
Get the details on Storage Pod 6.0 and learn how to build your own data storage server.
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Living Without Atomic Clocks
If someone knows even a little about Spanner, the first question they have is: "How does CockroachDB provide external consistency without atomic clocks?"
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Kik, left-pad, and npm
npm Blog (Archive); updates from the npm team are now published on the GitHub Blog and the GitHub Changelog
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Plans For New Reactors Worldwide
Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily. Most reactors under construction are in the Asian region. Significant further capacity is being created by plant uprating.
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Beware The Man Of One Study
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease…