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Why Do Famous People Get Paid $250k to Give a Speech?
The organizations willing to spend $20,000-$200,000 to hear a luminary speak include Wall Street banks, summer camp executives, and national associations of bakers.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
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Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?
In 1250, the southeastern United States was home to a city larger than London whose people built 200 huge, earthen pyramids. So why do so few people know about it?
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How Seattle Killed Micro-Housing
Micro-housing—dorm-room-sized apartments in desirable, walkable neighborhoods—isn’t for everyone, but it most definitely is for Anna Rogers. Anna is a recent college graduate who grew up in the suburbs of Seattle and now works a retail job while looking to start a career that harnesses her passion for politics. Thanks…
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Introducing “Ask a Female Engineer”
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
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How to get people who installed a leaked build to stop using that build?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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The Math Myth
Math professor David Edwards sent me this short essay on mathematical education. Printed with his permission. The Math Myth Themath myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were…
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EFF to Court: Government Must Inform People That It’s Accessing Their Data
Seattle, Washington—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution when it fails to notify people that it has accessed or examined their private communications stored by Internet providers in the cloud. EFF is supporting...
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Hunger and Undernourishment
What are the consequences of undernourishment and how can we make progress against hunger and undernourishment?
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One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: 2016 Report
Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030
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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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Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster
This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.
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NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender
Ahmed Mansoor was targeted by NSO Group, an Israel-based “cyber war” company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product.
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Looking ahead for WhatsApp
Today, we’re updating WhatsApp’s terms and privacy policy for the first time in four years, as part of our plans to test ways for people to communicate with businesses in the months ahead. The updated documents also reflect that we’ve joined Facebook and that we've recently rolled out many new features, like…
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Language contains human biases, and so will machines trained on language corpora
I have a new draft paper with Aylin Caliskan-Islam and Joanna Bryson titled Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases. We show empirically that natural language necessarily contains human biases, and the paradigm of training machine learning on language corpora means that…
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It’s time to bring more realistic models of human behaviour into economic policy
David Halpern. The Centre for Central Banking Studies recently hosted their annual Chief Economists Workshop, whose theme was “What can policymakers learn from other disciplines”. In this guest po…
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Amateur Radio Sleuthing Pins Down Source of Strange RF Interference
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
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We Shouldn’t Wait Another 15 Years for a Conversation About Government Hacking
With high-profile hacks in the headlines and government officials trying to reopen a long-settled debate about encryption, information security has become a mainstream issue. But we feel that one element of digital security hasn’t received enough critical attention: the role of government in...
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The Cuban CDN
On a recent trip to Cuba I brought with me a smartphone and hoped to get Internet access either via WiFi or 3G. I managed that (at a price) but also saw for myself how Cubans get access to an alternate Internet delivered by sneakernet.
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Decentralization is about diversity
Take control of your web by running your own personal cloud server with Sandstorm.
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With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy
Microsoft had an ambitious goal with the launch of Windows 10: a billion devices running the software by the end of 2018. In its quest to reach that goal, the company aggressively pushed Windows 10 on its users and went so far as to offer free upgrades for a whole year. However, the company’s...
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Debian turns 23
Today is Debian's 23rd anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities celebrating Debian Day 2016, you're very welcome to join the party! If not, there's still time for you to organize a little celebration or contribution to Debian....
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Are Rotisserie Chickens a Bargain?
Rotisserie chickens are delicious, ready-to-eat, and don't cost any more than an uncooked chicken. Is that combination too good to be true?
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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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