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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Elsevier steps up its War On Access
I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to…
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The NSA: An Inside View
In which I relate my experience as an NSA employee and impart my thoughts on the policies in place, my former coworkers, and the current cyber war.
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H5N1
Most of the time, we worry far too much about tail risk. We worry about terrorist attacks and necrotizing fasciitis, but not much about heart disease or car crashes. But in 2011, 17 US citizens...
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Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm
Reddit has a bug in their code. This bug is currently present in their production platform, and has been for years. It affects one of the most important algorithms in the entire site, the “Hot” ranking algorithm for link popularity. It has real, demonstrable negative effects. It has been reported to Reddit’s technical…
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Governments admit to faking terrorism: a list
Governments from around the world admit they carry out false flag terror: A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to…Read More
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A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe
We're reinvigorating the skilled trades in America by helping the next generation get the training they need for in-demand jobs and sharing their stories.
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Stop Saying Bitcoin Transactions Aren’t Reversible
One of the criticisms leveled at Bitcoin by those people determined to hate it is that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible.
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Evading Airport Security
The news is reporting about Evan Booth, who builds weaponry out of items you can buy after airport security. It’s clever stuff. It’s not new, though. People have been explaining how to evade airport security for years. Back in 2006, I—and others—explained how to print your own boarding pass and evade the photo-ID…
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Why You Can't Build a Smartphone
Every day or so I read another blog post (or ranting comments) about how BlackBerry could be rehabilitated, or how Nokia could restart Maemo and build the ultimate smartphone again. Things came to a head after Jolla announced their first phone for sale. Surely this phone with an amazing user interface will vindicate…
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Powerchair: A dad hacks a wheelchair for his disabled 2-year-old son
We wanted Alejandro to have a power wheelchair. We wanted him to be able to move through the world by his own volition and it’s clear that the ability to independently explore his environment is important for his cognitive development on multiple levels. We tried going through the typical process of obtaining a power…
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Thrun pivots Udacity toward vocational education
Internet applications and technology and their implications for individuals, organizations and society
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Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
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Is work necessary?
I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:
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It's practically impossible for regular people to buy Bitcoin
We’re in the middle of a huge Bitcoin bubble resembling Tulip mania. There’s now huge demand in the mainstream to buy bitcoin for speculation mainly due to med…
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A universal income is not such a silly idea
The concept of paying people to sit around has an upside, writes Tim Harford ‘Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult.” Reuters, 4 October 2013 How much is that? It’s about £1,700…
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How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties
The basic formula for Hacker News ranking has been known for years , but questions remained. Does the published code give the real algorithm...
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How Money Moves Around The Banking System
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …