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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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The myth of NASA's expensive space pens
There’s a story about NASA’s incredibly expensive space pen and Russia’s simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces so
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Things You Can Do That Will Make You Happier
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It's also no surprise that it's the Nr....
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Anonymity Is Hard
Anonymity in the real world is very hard In late 2011 Hezbollah rolled up a CIA spy ring in Lebanon. This provides an interesting lesson in CIA …
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Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
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Interview of Glenn Greenwald [video]
This must be the most cringe-inducing interview by a senior journalist I’ve ever seen. It’s conducted by Kirsty Wark, one of the BBC’s top presenters, and takes places on Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship nightly current affairs programme. It truly makes me more ashamed of the “profession” of journalism than I already was
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The Arsenic DNA paper exposes flaws in peer review
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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The Hacker News Generation (Afraid of Hard Work)
Soft skills play an important role for programmers, listening to clients’ requirements, creating solutions, and communicating effectively can make or break a career.
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Hacker Scouts teaches children Linux, robotics, and welding
Track and improve how AI assistants recommend your brand across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude & more.
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Prediction Markets
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
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Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
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How traffic actually works
Every so often this article makes the rounds and it annoys me. That isn’t how traffic works and the proposed solutions won’t fix anything. Maybe you can eliminate the annoying stop-and-go, but no one gets home any faster. In fact you can prove that you and everyone behind you get home strictly later than if you had…
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Bitcoin is Worse is Better
2011 essay on how Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties compared to purer competitors nevertheless successfully takes over a niche, survives, and becomes gradually refined.
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Senator Feinstein Admits the NSA Taps the Internet Backbone
We know from the Snowden documents (and other sources) that the NSA taps the Internet backbone through secret agreements with major US telcos., but the US government still hasn’t admitted it. In late August, the Obama administration declassified a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Footnote 3…
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Thoreau 2.0
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland.
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NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover – I am setting them free
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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Today I Deleted My LinkedIn Account; You Probably Should Too
(Please note corrections after the post) Today I will delete my LinkedIn account. I say I will instead of I have because I do not know how LinkedIn’s account settings work; deleting my accou…
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Metadata Equals Surveillance
Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people—including President Obama—discounted the seriousness of the NSA’s actions by saying that it’s just metadata. Lots and lots…
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