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Engineer demos how SpaceX is building fracked well gas plant
And your precious first principles math proves it
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The Single-Page-App Morality Play
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Gell-Mann Amnesia
Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area.
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Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting
On Wednesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story about how its staff discovered and reported a security vulnerability in a Missouri state education website that exposed the Social Security numbers of 100,000 elementary and secondary teachers. In a press conference this morning, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) said…
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Back to EU
While the UK has now left the EU, Cronofy is about to re-join. The UK government's plans to weaken data privacy laws is the final straw.
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And you will know us by the company we keep
It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the…
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European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance
It’s not actually banned in the EU yet—the legislative process is much more complicated than that—but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces…
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3D Printing Sex Toys
Ok so, sex toys! Admit it. You've thought about it. 😉But it seems so complex! You can't use a sex toy straight from the printer because the materials and nozzles aren't body safe, and even if they were, the layer lines are a breeding ground for bacteria. So traditionally you'd have to print a blank and smooth it (with…
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Facebook Recruiter Correspondence
A brief exchange with a Facebook recruiter in the summer of 2020
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Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook
Unfollow Everything and the need for (good) tech regulation.
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Your Money and Your Life (Edward Snowden)
Central Bank Digital Currencies will ransom our future
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Facebook Political Problems
Facebook’s political problems stem directly from its size and drive for growth; they are societal issues, not antitrust ones.
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A catalog of wealth-creation mechanisms (2009)
One of the guest lecturers aboard the ship [1] (Donald Gibbs, of Pearl-Harbor conspiracy-theory infamy) gave a very interesting talk a few ...
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Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated
Back in April I wrote Cryptocurrency's Carbon Footprint about the catastrophic carbon emissions of Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies such as B...
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Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge
Brave and Firefox implement support for the microsoft-edge: URL scheme. Brave to hijack Bing search links. Plus, the history of all this anti-competitive crap.
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Finally, on CBS, the football matches the business cards
The score bar at the bottom of the screen during a football game has an obvious function: It tells you how many points a team has scored. In some cases, such as the 2021 Chicago Bears, this function is ceremonial. Nonetheless, we primarily use the score bar as an information
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John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
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Beware Centralization
Imagine merging three public firms, by making each firm into a division of a single new firm with one new boss.
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Dublin Core's dirty little secret (2010)
[This is part two in a series — you should read part 1 first for context and then you might go on to part 3.] The Dublin Core — metadata made dumb Just when librarians were in despair o…
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Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign:
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Alexander von Humboldt: the first Solarpunk
Humbolt was captivated by lush nature but loved humanity and the new technological developments. He believed that if we understand Nature and the laws governing her, we can create a sustainable future. He was the first Solarpunk and here are his ideas
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Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
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Something weird is happening on Facebook
Someone appears to be pouring enormous energy and effort into a data collection project aimed at building personality profiles from social media interaction…again
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On Solitude
Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience.
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Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app
telegra.ph/why-telegram-had-to-follow-apple-and-google-when-they-suspended-a-voting-app-09-252021229 points168 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
Telegram gives its users more freedom of speech than any other popular mobile application. Unlike other apps, Telegram can't be pressured by shareholders, cloud providers or advertisers into unjustified censorship. Telegram doesn't exist in isolation, however. It depends on other companies to function, from banks and…