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Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countr…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 136 posts.
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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
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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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Life Expectancy
People are living longer across the world, but large differences remain. Explore global data on life expectancy and how it has changed over time.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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The Intellectual Yet Idiot
(Chapter in Skin in the game )
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HN comments are underrated
HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously…
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Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. “Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things.…
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U.S. lags behind peer countries in mobility
The notion that anyone in America who is willing and able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can achieve significant upward mobility is deeply embedded in U.S. society. Conventional wisdom holds that class barriers in the United States are the lowest among the world’s advanced economies. Motivating this…
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Trademark Law Does Not Require Companies To Tirelessly Censor the Internet
Over the past few days, EFF and one of our staff technologists, the talented Micah Lee, have had an illuminating back and forth with Canonical Ltd over the use of the Ubuntu mark. While we don’t believe that Canonical has acted with malice or intent to censor, its silly invocation of trademark law...
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You Are Still Crying Wolf
Go away, pro-Trump bots [Update 5/30: I originally took this post down because it got picked up by some pro-Trump accounts that I think were bots which would post it several times a day to various …
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Economic Inequality
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
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A Protocol for Dying
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Request For Research: Basic Income
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
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Inequality and Skin in the Game
(Chapter from Skin in the Game)
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Apple can comply with the FBI court order
Earlier today, a federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request for technical assistance in the recovery of the San Bernadino gunmen’s iPhone 5C. Since then, many have argued whether these requests from the FBI are technically feasible given the support for strong encryption on iOS devices. Based on my…
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Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race, gender, education
Donald Trump's win followed a campaign that revealed deep divisions that were as wide and in some cases wider than in previous elections.