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Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,107 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Federal Spending: Where Does the Money Go
In fiscal year 2014, the federal government will spend around $3.8 trillion. These trillions of dollars make up a considerable chunk - around 22 percent - of the US. economy, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That means that federal government spending makes up a sizable share of all money spent in the…
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A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
by John Perry Barlow Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.We have no elected...
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.
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Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society
A playable post on how harmless choices can make a harmful world.
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Death rates from energy production per TWh
Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity.
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Poverty
In order to make progress against poverty in the future, we need to understand poverty around the world today and how it has changed.
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Money creation in the modern economy
Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1
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Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives
Robots.txt files were invented 20+ years ago to help advise “robots," mostly search engine web crawlers, which sections of a web site should be crawled and indexed for search. Many sites use their robots.txt files to improve their SEO (search engine optimization) by excluding duplicate content like print versions of…
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The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories (2014)
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
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The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication
If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them “AI agents” if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of …
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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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Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
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Energy Production and Consumption
Explore data on how energy production and use varies across the world.
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Warren Buffett's bet against hedge funds at the Long Now Foundation (2008-17)
will go to Girls Incorporated of Omaha if Buffett wins, or Friends of Absolute Return for Kids, Inc if Protege Partners, LLC wins.
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1. Trends in income and wealth inequality
Barely 10 years past the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the U.S. economy is doing well on several fronts. The labor market is on a job-creating streak that…
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Why Many Cities Have No Money
Problems have solutions. Predicaments have outcomes. We're in a predicament.
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Excess mortality from March to December of 2020
Explore data on COVID-19 excess mortality across the world.
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Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook
I have never had a Facebook account, or an Instagram account. There is a Facebook account called "Richard Stallman", but it is an impostor.
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The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)
Ghost Influence by Brian Swichkow2023335 points75 commentscited by 37Society, Policy & Culture details
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
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Golden Gate Claude
When we amplify the "Golden Gate Bridge" feature, Claude's responses focus on the bridge. For a short time, anyone can interact with this model.
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You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local
“Eat local” is a common recommendation to reduce your diet's carbon footprint. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it comes from?
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Satirical Summaries of Hacker News
Does anyone have any questions about NAFTA for my PSYCHIC PIG?