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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 Locust Economy
Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here's how it happened. I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon.…
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Hacker News Folks Get Long Overdue Thanks
Well over a year ago, the Free Software and Linux Communities came together for a focused cause. To save my life. For those that d...
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Snowden's Dead Man's Switch
Edward Snowden has set up a dead man’s switch. He’s distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him. Dead man’s switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if…
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What is Programmer Anarchy and does it have a future?
A developer I know recently told me that he wasn’t interested in any new opportunities in the short term because his team were about to adopt Fred George’s post-agile concept of Programmer Anarchy…
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Don't be evil: Moving everything off of Google
Wherein I move many of my internet services away from Google Apps.
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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
The Mortal Passage Trilogy: An Epic in Four Stories is now available. That link leads to Amazon, but you can find it on iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and elsewhere too.
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Hey programmers, we need to talk
This article is now in Russian! Hey guys. Thanks for coming to this meeting on such short notice. There’s coffee in the back. Did somebody spot the token recruiter yet? And show him the door?…
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Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income
The digitization of our economy will bring with it a new generation of radical economic ideologies, of which Bitcoin is arguably the first. For those with assets, technological savvy, and a sense ...
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Movie Subtitle Fansite Raided By Copyright Industry And Police
The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se has been raided by the police and copyright industry. This marks an escalation of the war against sharing culture...
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San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
It's impossible to argue that San Francisco hasn't changed my life dramatically. When I moved to the Bay Area four years ago, I was an inexperienced kid who was working at a Genius Bar in an Apple Store. I didn't know JavaScript at all—hell, I could barely program and my useless liberal arts degree was doing nothing…
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Unshackle the Middle Class
Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to
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Lockdown
Officially, Google killed Reader because “over the years usage has declined”. 1 I believe that statement, especially if API clients weren’t considered “usage”, but I don’t believe that’s the entire reason.
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Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts
“Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”
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NSA E-Mail Eavesdropping
More Snowden documents analyzed by the Guardian—two articles—discuss how the NSA collected e-mails and data on Internet activity of both Americans and foreigners. The program might have ended in 2011, or it might have continued under a different name. This is the program that resulted in that bizarre tale of Bush…
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Never Trust Facebook
I stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but I didn’t want to remove my account and have no visibility on how or what Facebook might be showing about me or someone using my name. So I decide…
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Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
When we posted our first year-end lists way back in 2006, the whole mp3 blog thing was still fairly new. We certainly weren't the trailblazers, but we did have the advantage of starting our little music blog before the internet became flooded with the likes of us, before services like Hype Machine and Elbo.ws were…
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Alcoholism in Antarctica
This is a post over two months in the making as it’s pulled together some hard times from Pole. I hope it helps someone. While I stand by what I’ve done and my justifications, I can’t say they give me great comfort. Today is Midwinter in Antarctica. It is one of the most important dates … Continue reading "Alcoholism…
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Opt Out of Klout Now
Sites like Klout and Kred are perfect examples of social media frippery. A vaguely plausible "score" that you can use to justify your "investment" in tweeting all day long. When they're used as a silly little badge, or an informal competition with friends, they're a (mostly) harmless way of gamification. Of continual…