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Against Murderism
[Content warning: discussion of racism. Comments are turned off due to bad experience with the comments on this kind of material.] I. A set of questions, hopefully confusing: Alice is a white stay-…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Real name policies and ruling the world
Launch your business with WordPress or Website Builder using AI tools, templates, and reliable hosting.
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Someone cloned my website and is using it to scam people
I was looking on the DuckDuckGo search results for "anonymous bitcoin sms" today, just to see what was out there. My SMS Privacy was the top result, as expected. But the second result was new to me:
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Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl
On the thirty-first anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history, over one hundred people from the former Soviet Union shared their …
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Words growing or shrinking in Hacker News titles: a tidy analysis
In May, some friends and I built Tagger News, a real-time automatic classifier of Hacker News articles based on their text (see here for more about how we built it). This process started me down some interesting paths, particularly analyzing trends in titles. By finding words that became more or less common in Hacker…
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Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker
Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor ...
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How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner
Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor ...
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Too many people are buying cars using financial products they do not understand
It was free!” announces Bob the Dinosaur, an adorable moron from the Dilbert cartoon. Bob is driving a bright red convertible. “They just make you sign papers!”, he elaborates. That cartoon is a qu…
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No politics please, we're hackers, too busy to improve the world
If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics. This is evidenced in many ways including ‘safe spaces’ and moratoria on discussing anything political because it has no bearing on the more interesting bits of…
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Facebook is an attack on the open web
Dave Winer won’t link to Facebook posts from his blog. I don’t either.
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Enough with the dead butterflies
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
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Why do so few people major in computer science?
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
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The scourge of web analytics
I’ve been making web apps since 2003, which means that I’ve been doing this for fourteen years now, or it means that I can’t count. So, there are few people more qualified than me to tell you this:
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Better than Free (2008)
[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →
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The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction
We are living through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon, usually in the context of some complaint or other about...
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How Much Does it Cost to Climb Mount Everest?
alanarnette.com is a site covering big mountain climbing including Everest, K2, and the 7 summits. All based on Alan's experience including Everest in 2011 and the oldest American at 58 to summit K2 in 2014.
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Bringing back the Somali shilling
Somalia has long played host to one of the world's strangest monetary phenomenon, a paper currency without a central bank. I explored the...
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Get your loved ones off Facebook
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
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Laptop Ban a Reaction to X-Ray Equipment Stolen by ISIS
On March 21st, 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered airlines flying to the U.S. out of 10 airports, mostly in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, to refuse to transport …
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Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
I. Vox’s David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here, but the the…
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FCC Filings Overwhelmingly Support Net Neutrality Once Spam Is Removed
An Explosion of Comments
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Google and Paint.NET need to stop misleading users (2013)
The Paint.NET web site runs ads designed to lead naïve users to download unrelated adware. This needs to stop
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Book Review: Seeing Like A State
I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later.…
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