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Fukushima
When I visited Chernobyl 7 years ago, I didn’t think that a similar disaster could take place anywhere ever again, and certainly not in Japan.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The Jason Bourne Aesthetic
“The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” –Douglas Adams
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Is it futile to un-Google?
A rant on the obsession with privacy stuff.
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Discrete Analysis – A new type of math journal
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
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Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
There is a classic thought experiment in the field of artificial intelligence which is often used to explain how an AI might inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity as a by-product of tryin…
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TSA Master Keys
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors…
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Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever
So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they’ve ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and…
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Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal
In life, love, war, and planetary colonization, even long-lasting friendships can end if one betrays the other's trust for his own gain. We studied the language of betrayal by observing players of Diplomacy , the game that ruins friendships . In this very popular game, players can form alliances and try to conquer the…
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…
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Safe from what?
What does it mean for a baby monitor to be safe? Some things are clearly essential: It should not explode; it should not release significant quantities of dangerous gasses; if it's designed to be placed within reach of a baby, it should not pose an electrocution or choking hazard. Less obviously, if it has data or…
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How the Dutch got their cycling infrastructure (2011)
How did the Dutch get their cycling infrastructure? This question keeps coming back because it is of course relevant to people who want what the Dutch have. Road building traditions go back a long …
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A Little Bit of the Manuals
Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentati…
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The Tomb of Queen Esther in Persia
“How much is the taxi to Khomeini Square?” “ Gheymati nadore, it does not cost anything”, the old taxi driver spreads his arms...
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“I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon”
Last Saturday, I read the 6,000-word New York Times piece, “Inside Amazon,” in the car on my way to the beach. I sat quietly in the front…
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A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
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It Is Done
When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high le…
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We are barely halfway done
I’m kind of broken. It has been a very productive day. I have been here since 8 in the morning. We have boxed over 400 boxes of material. There have been about a dozen and a half of volunteer…
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Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web
(Short form article, Short lecture , Long lecture , demo of a fraction of the idea of a distributed website (or paste this link in maelstrom ))
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Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
A day after my previous post, and things have been happening. SHORT TERM: First, I asked for people to send money if they couldn’t help any other way, and people have. This took away any conc…