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Web3 is a stupid idea
timdaub · Web3 is a stupid idea A long time ago, I gave a talk in front of a full audience talking about BigchainDB, a company I worked for to create a (scalable) decentralized database. As
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Big Brothers Has Privatized
A Short Story
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Why admitting Covid is Airborne is so hard
Evidence for airborne spread of Covid-19 is strong, but authorities underemphasize airborne protections. The curious history of infectious disease reveals how this anti-airborne bias emerged.
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People are realizing that degrowth is bad
The mad schemes degrowthers advocate are a fantasy that distracts us from real efforts to save the planet
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Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent
Tyler Cowen is an economist that has spotted top talent in fields ranging from biotech to literature, often years before insiders. How does he do it?
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Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Central Banks
Bad things lead to more bad things. But (some) bad things can be fixed.
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Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor (2011)
September 2011 Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich. —Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera , 22 Feb. 2011 It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic p
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A Compass for the Politics of Collapse
The word "collapse" appears more and more often in recent political debate. Online, in the media, in the Academia, and in radical politic...
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French Appeal Court affirms decision that copyright claims on GPL are invalid
This article follows the case of Entr’Ouvert vs Orange on a GPL copyright violation. The case went to the Tribunal de Grande Instance in 2019 and went to the Cour d’Appel recently in 20…
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NP Complete 3rd Grade Math Problems (2018)
Leo’s third grade class got to try a Noyce Foundation math worksheet [1] the other day. They didn’t fare so well, but I gotta tell you, some of the problems are REALLY hard! In fact, on…
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The 74,000 numbers of Barclays Bank
The UK faces an epidemic of telephone scams. Fraudsters are constantly calling people up pretending to be their bank. But how can you be sure the number displayed on your screen in genuine? You can't. The telecom system is hopelessly insecure and shouldn't be trusted for anything more complicated than dialling the…
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My love-hate affair with technology
Ten years ago I would have considered myself someone who was excited about new technology. I always had the latest smartphone, I would read the reviews of new…
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The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy
“Under His Eye,” she says. The right farewell. “Under His Eye,” I reply, and she gives a little nod.
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Sputnik V: fraudulent clinical trial data
Sputnik V clinical trial data seems as trustworthy as Putin’s election results.
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The rise of user-hostile software
On the trend of consumer software designed around developer convenience instead of user needs, from forced accounts to telemetry to privilege creep.
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My dead dad’s journal
For some reason, when my brother told me our dad was dead, I immediately went and listened to my voicemails. He left me silly voicemails often and I wanted to hear his voice.
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Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?
I set out to investigate whether Hacker News is a useful barometer for up-and-coming technologies that will hit the mainstream within the next few years.
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Fighting Like Taliban
Over the last month or so we have seen several reports out of Afghanistan registering the shock of the Americans, the Afghani government, and even the Taliban itself with the speed at which the Tal…
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Machine learning’s crumbling foundations
Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that's unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that's insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.
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Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
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Free Software, not as in ‘free speech’, nor as in ‘free beer’
Ahmad Haghighi’s personal page.
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Ashley's Apple Story
Ashley's Apple Saga