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Saint IGNUcius
Stallman is a saint in the Church of Emacs—Saint IGNUcius. I bless your computer, my child! (jpeg 31k, photo by Wouter van Oortmerssen)
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
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Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception
There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.
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Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?
Collection of Peter Thiel's evidence that we're economically stagnating and no longer living in a technologically-accelerating civilization.
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How I Pranked My Roommate with Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads
Ghost Influence by Brian Swichkow2014343 points46 commentscited by 8Tech Industry & Business details
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
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TSA's X-Ray Nude Body Scanners Output 50% More Radiation Than Admitted to by TSA
A few weeks ago, scientific researchers from top universities released a report confirming my 2012 demonstration that anything can be easily smuggled through the TSA’s nude body scanners. Whi…
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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Coursera
I’m excited to be teaching Stanford Law’s first Coursera offering this fall, on government surveillance . In preparation, I’ve been extensively poking around the platform; while I found some snazzy features, I also stumbled across a few security and privacy issues.
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The Future Programming Manifesto
It’s time to reformulate the principles guiding my work. [Revised definition of complexity in response to misunderstandings]
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An Example of Forensic Science at Its Worst: US v. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair
In early 2014, I provided material support in what would end up turning around what was, in their own words, the US Army’s biggest case in a generation, and much to the dismay of the prosecution team that brought me in to assist them. In the process, it seems I also prevented what the evidence pointed to as an…
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There’s a simple alternative to the current web
Via @roundtrip, this conversation from July: There’s actually a pretty simple alternative to the current web. In federated wiki, when you find a page you like, you curate it to your own serve…
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AAAS Blocking Access to the Scientific Literature When They Say It Is “Free”
A blog about microbiology, genomics and metagenomics, sequencing, evolution, ecology, and open science.
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Deconstructing Finnish
Now and then, as I continue trying to improve my Finnish language kyky (ability), I decide it’s high time that I actually understand the...
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Mitch Hedberg and GIS
Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. Last night after the kids were asleep, I sat down with a beer (Sierra Nevada) and figured out how I could get the data and perform the calculation.
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An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
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Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
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Law Students Fend Off a Patent Troll
A handful of Brooklyn Law students forced a patent troll to drop a meritless lawsuit.
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The US Intelligence Community has a Third Leaker
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
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