The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr) You can read what you probably came here for at archive.org But if you’ll allow me first: Bringing people together is my life’s work. The text that was originally …
I use Facebook every day — probably too much for my own good — and I’ve always been tempted to dive into their internals. That is, the…
There has been an explosive new development in how scientific research is read and distributed. It’s name is Sci-Hub [https://web.archive.org/web/20181007100235/https://sci-hub.cc/]. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan (who was, at the time, a 22 year-old graduate student based in
The Revolution Will Not Take Place in a Classroom
On the day that I am scheduled to see my friend Chelsea for the first time in six years, I wake up at 4:51pm to a shrieking fire alarm in my hotel room. Semi-conscious and disoriented, I leap out of bed and spin around wildly grabbing at all the things I care about – my phone and passport, the precious slip of paper…
Jerry Brown has proposed legislation that would allow a lot more housing to be built in the Bay Area, and hopefully significantly reduce the cost of housing here. More supply should lead to lower...
I remember AIDS. I’m older than you probably think I am, and I remember what AIDS in America meant in the eighties, when William F. Buckley suggested all “carriers” be tattooed, a…
‘A “big data” approach to inflation is helping us understand the fundamental question of why recessions happen’ In the dying days of 2015 came news to set any geek’s pulse racing: the declaration o…
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
Everyone agrees that housing in San Francisco is expensive, and that the high costs are hurting the city. But there is a lot of disagreement...
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been uploading thousands of Hip-hop Mixtapes into the archive. The resulting collection still has a way to go before it’s everything I have acquired a…
A tour of Silicon Valley
A few weeks ago I gave a guest lecture at the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. Being a Windesheim graduate myself I’ve always kept in touch with my former teachers. One of them told me recently that a lot of students want to learn more about IT security & hacking and invited me to give a…
I'm not sure what it was. Might have been the Predator movies, might have been something else. Heat vision. The ability to see heat was something I wanted for…
Reader question: “Why do all old statues have such small penises?” The reader who sent me this felt that it was a question that was maybe too silly for my blog, but – firstly – there ar…
