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The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 86 posts.
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The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
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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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EU Council to Vote on Chat Scanning Proposal on Thursday
🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0, stopchatcontrol.fr🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇩🇰 Danish: chatcontrol.dk🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole Table of contents: The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence and the End of Anonymous Communication Take action to stop Chat
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Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups
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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
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Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
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Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)
Rich countries consume much higher quantities via higher intensity/tech. It's NOT high and rising: wages, profits, administration, encounters, etc. Income well explains American behavior here too.
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Amnesty International concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza
Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.
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What the data says about crime in the U.S.
Federal statistics show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s.
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There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)
There is such a thing as a free lunch
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How decentralized is Bluesky really?
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
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New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
15
Please don't mention AI again
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.
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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
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Meta’s Broken Promises
The 51-page report, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” documents a pattern of undue removal and suppression of protected speech including peaceful expression in support of Palestine and public debate about Palestinian human rights. Human Rights Watch found…
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The Shameful Defenestration of Tim
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
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Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - Harvard Law School
On July 22, 2013, Turkish scholar and social media expert Zeynep Tufekci tweeted “Last year, I pondered the first ‘social-media fueled ethnic cleansing.’ With ethnic tensions & expanding online hate speech, is it Burma?” 1
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China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.
23
Recall: Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC
Photographic memory comes to Windows, and is the biggest security setback in a decade.
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The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better
It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible.
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Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
Want to learn more? Learn To Count to a Billion in Korean in 15 Minutes ! Or Learn to Read Russian in 15 Minutes !
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Statement of ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan KC: Applications for arrest warrants in the situation in the State of Palestine
Today I am filing applications for warrants of arrest before Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court in the Situation in the State of Palestine. Image ICC Prosecutor Khan on application for arrest warrants in the situation in the State of Palestine Watch Download Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim…
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Accountability sinks
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
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Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union
Apple announced changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store impacting developers’ apps in the EU to comply with the DMA.
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Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.