5821
Questions about the Sunday Times Snowden Story
Official website for UK-based journalist Ryan Gallagher.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
5822
Why the US federal employee record breach is worse than others
During the week of June 8th, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that the records of all current and past US federal employees had been compromised. That includes standard employment information - address, social security numbers, etc - of over 4 million people ranging from a random forest ranger to US…
5823
What the Next Generation Needs Is Math, Not Programming
It is the intelligent analysis of information that would be critical in a decade from now.
5824
Reassessing Airport Security
News that the Transportation Security Administration missed a whopping 95% of guns and bombs in recent airport security “red team” tests was justifiably shocking. It’s clear that we’re not getting value for the $7 billion we’re paying the TSA annually. But there’s another conclusion, inescapable and disturbing to…
5825
They Took Our Myths
Back to: A product review, and some musing | Forward to: What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
5826
Is Social Rejection the Key to Creativity?
On the psychology of why rejection and loneliness may be necessary evils for the creative genius
5827
HTML is done
Item: The W3C HTML Working Group charter is expiring . Item: Discussion on what to do is inconclusive . Item: Things are pretty quiet in the WhatWG. Conclusion: The best thing to do about HTML is nothing .
5828
Against Tulip Subsidies
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
5829
California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
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Facebook and PGP
Facebook just announced support for PGP, an encrypted email standard, for email from them to you. It’s an interesting move on many levels, albeit one that raises some interesting questions. The answers, and Facebook’s possible follow-on moves, are even more interesting.
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FBI doesnt want you to know it uses NSLs to correlate identities you use online
Back in March, I parsed the declaration Nicholas Merrill submitted in his bid to reveal the contents of what he was asked to turn over via an NSL back in 2004. As a reminder, here’s what FBI permitted Merrill to reveal at the beginning of this suit. And here’s Merrill’s description of what kind of […]
5834
Goodbye, Sourceforge
This page used to be a rant about SourceForge's shady practices around circa 2015, along with some basic comparison of other hosting services.
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The Backing Up of the Internet Archive Continues
A little over a month ago, I cooked up a grandiose plan with the Archive Team to back up the Internet Archive, and discussed what that might entail and how one might approach it. How’s that t…
5840
The responsibility we have as software engineers
I had the chance to chat this week with the very awesome Kate Heddleston who mentioned that she’s been thinking a lot about the ethics of being a software engineer, something she just spoke a…
5841
Ta'izz
I wake up to a gorgeous morning in Ibb. This time I’ve slept through the morning call to prayer and the sun is well up in the sky. Out the window there’s a view of a regular city against a backdrop of green mountains, with some construction equipment in the near foreground, and it takes my groggy mind a minute to…
5842
I Want Your AOL CDs
Yes, yes I do. As you might expect, someone who does a lot of something (collecting) like I do, in a pretty public fashion, tends to get some pretty shiny-polished chestnuts tossed over the fence. …
5843
Thoughtcrime
Back to: The Ultimate Tech Frontier: Your Brain | Forward to: The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
5844
Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013)
Note: This post was adapted from an answer I wrote on Quora. EDIT: I’m working on something that I hope will make things better. Check out interviewing.io. I’ve been hiring people in some capacity for the past 3 years. First, I was doing it as an engineer, then as an in-house recruiter, and now as […]
5845
Be Kind
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
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The Town That Creep Built
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
5848
I would have hired Doug, but...
Philip Greenspun wrote a post on his Harvard blog about MIT grads over 50 having a hard time finding work. In his post he cites a piece I wrote about how I would have hired Doug Engelbart, when I was running my first startup in the 80s. His piece is getting a lot of traffic. That's good. I'm glad people are thinking…
5849
Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide
In this post, I’m going to talk about suicide, and why I’m still on this planet. These are stories I’ve kept secret from my family, girlfriends, and closest friends for years. Recently, however, I had an experience that shook me—woke me up—and I decided that it was time to share it all. So, despite the shame I […]
5850
“Information asymmetry” cuts both ways
– A Soviet-era political joke according to Wikipedia , though I've only seen it in an English text describing the C++ object model