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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Stuxnet was embarrassing, not amazing (2011)
As the New York Times posts yet another breathless story about Stuxnet, I’m surprised that no one has pointed out its obvious deficiencies. Everyone seems to be hyperventilating about its pur…
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The crisis in physics is not only about physics
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours
Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and no…
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Mass cellphone surveillance experiment in Spain
Spanish Statistics Institute will track all cellphones for eight days (2 min, link in Spanish, via) A few facts first: Carriers geotrack all users by default, using cell tower triangulation. They also store logs of your calls and sms, but that is
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The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
We use some names mostly for boys and some mostly for girls, but then there is a small percentage that, over time, switched from one gender to another. Which names made the biggest switch?
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Airbnb in the Himalayas
Above my mountain-top cottage in a beautiful Himalayan village, the road ends and the forest begins. After sunset, flying squirrels come out. Leopards
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“May You Live in Interesting Times”
Chinese Curse? Austen Chamberlain? Frederic R. Coudert? Joseph Chamberlain? Diplomatic Staff? Albert Camus? Arthur C. Clarke? Robert F. Kennedy? Hillary Rodham Clinton?
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We Never Paid for Journalism
In 2006 at around 4 am, a man appears at the door of a security booth in Downtown Los Angeles. He slowly opens the door, being careful not to be noticed. He grabs the key attached to a small crowbar h
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Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
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Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]
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The Internet and the Third Estate
Mark Zuckerberg suggested that social media is a “Fifth Estate”; in fact, social media is a means by which the Third Estate — commoners — can seize political power. Here history matters…
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The invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election – ranked
It’s been a long, confusing, exhausting federal election season. We’re all tired. But put aside your worries, fellow citizens; it’s time for the invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal …
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Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
David analyzes the root causes of the Boeing 737 Max crash. Read here.
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ET Don't Phone Home
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
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Coffee Is Hard
Way back in the 80s, some people had a dream of combining the cutesy graphics of 80s visual games and the soul-crushing difficulty of 80s text adventures. And so Sierra On-Line created quest games.
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On Recent Controversial Events
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
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Make More Land
We used to make land. We built long wharves for docking ships, and then over time filled in the areas between them. Later we built up mudflats wholesale to make even larger areas. Here's a map of Boston showing how much of the land wasn't previously dry: (Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map &…
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The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i…
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Digital pollution
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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The Acid Farmers
How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world
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