Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 45 posts.
Steve Yegge: Have you ever legalized marijuana?
It seems like there's actually a model we could use for legalizing marijuana. From 1919 to 1933 alcohol went from being legal to illegal back to legal again. It happened. Lots of people died when alcohol was illegal. More probably die now that it is legal. And technically, marijuana is legal in California for medical…
The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle ) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The…
State "keep right" laws
All states allow drivers to use the left lane (when there is more than one in the same direction) to pass. Most states restrict use of the left lane by slow-moving traffic that is not passing. The table below describes the law in effect in each state.
Verizon doesn't know Dollars from Cents
Click here for Audio (27 minutes - PutFile is reporting the time wrong) Here's the background: I have a Verizon unlimited data plan in the ...
Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
Get Satisfaction, a third-party customer service app/community, allows customers to offer feedback, make suggestions, get their questions answered, and generally get help with a product or service. A good idea Building support/community infrastructure is a pain point for a lot of companies. The…
Schneier: The Value of Privacy
Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
Unqualified Reservations: From Cromer to Romer and back again: colonialism for the 21st century
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
Three Major Singularity Schools
( Originally appeared on the Machine Intelligence Research Institute blog, September 2007.)
Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal
Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking.Apple's iPhone,...
Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety
This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.
Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story: