The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
The molecule DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. The transition from our world to theirs occurs with no cessation of consciousness or…
I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some ar…
I’m proud to be part of a team that is bringing green cars to the masses. As a production worker at Tesla’s plant in Fremont for the past…
I am old enough to remember the gogo days of cable TV when entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new cable channel would go, hat in hand and cap table in tow, to the big cable companies and beg to get distribution on their networks. When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we […]
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
This Daily Mail piece by David Derbyshire is so profound it has been cited over and over: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations: an interview with four generations of the same family about how far they were allowed to wander as kids. It comes from Britain but will sound familiar to
There is much I take for granted in my life, and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things. In my 46 years, I’ve lived under nine different presidents. The first I remember is Carter. I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1992, but I
I’ve kept my mouth shut about President Trump since he was elected in early November. I figured there were other things to focus on where I could have an impact and so I did that. But friday’s executive orders are too much for me. Trump is institutionalizing hatred, bigotry, and racism with these orders. They […]
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Story of an Iranian Student in US
It is time for tech companies to start speaking up about some of the actions taken by President Trump’s administration. There are many actions from his first week that are objectionable. In...
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Action Item: If you’re an American academic, please sign the petition against the Immigration Executive Order. (There are already more than eighteen thousand signatories, including Nobel Laur…
Many new technologies have unexpected impacts on the physical or social world in which we live.
After my trip in Hamburg, Germany, for the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress, I left Germany for t
The internet does to the world what radio did to the world January 21, 2017 Ideas, Misc Over the holidays, I finally found the time to read Marshall McLuhan’s book “Understanding media” (I might have spent time with it during my studies but definitely didn’t pay too much attention back…
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov we…
Today’s processors contain billions of heat-generating transistors in an ever shrinking space. The power budget might go from: * 1000 watts on a specialized server * 100 watts on desktops * 30 watts on laptops * 5 watts on tablets * 1 or 2 watts on a phone * 100 milliwatts on an embedded
“Side hustle,” “mom-tech,” and “the sharing economy” are covering up something sinister
This is a guest post by VR developer Hugh Hancock , creator of Vive horror/RPG Left-Hand Path .
The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect–for one thing, I think health insurance should be entirely separate from employment–but I hate the thought of losing it without a replacement for people...
What follows is my personal perspective on an interesting dispute. Obviously, it is only my opinion of the situation and there are two sides to every story. I invite the other side to respond if they wish in the comments. I also made the decision to keep the other side anonymous after I first wrote
