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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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Schneier on Security: Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start
China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further. Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to…
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The monetization paradox (or why Google is not my friend) (Charles Stross)
The continual plaint in newspapers around the world is that the news media are in big trouble. Au contraire: what's in trouble is their monetization model.
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Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy" come...
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Google Agrees to Censor Encyclopedia Dramatica Entry in Australia
Google self-censors certain results in countries like France or Germany, and Australia as well. The Sydney Morning Herald writes:
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Ageism is becoming an issue for me
By ageism, I mean people saying that my age makes me less intelligent, informed, clued, aware, whatever. It's never rational, not part of an intelligent discussion. I can't probe the people to find out what they mean. I assume they're expressing some frustration and projecting it on me.
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Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See
Avatar half-tells a story we would all prefer to forget
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HN long term change
HN visitors are generally worried that HN is changing, and most of the worries center (obviously) around whether or not it is changing for the worse.
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"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".
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What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google
Are we really in control when making decisions? In his book, Dan Ariely unmasks the subtle but powerful tricks that our minds play on us.
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The Apple Tablet
If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or *just* anything, I say you’re thinking too small.
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Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety
This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.
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Trust Science
Well, of course we all do trust science. We trust Bernoulli's Principle every time we get on a plane; we trust celestial mechanics when we take the kids outside to watch a scheduled lunar eclipse ; we trust subatomic physics when we relax with an iPod; we trust the laws of chemistry every time we strike a match; we…
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Intercepting Predator Video
Sometimes mediocre encryption is better than strong encryption, and sometimes no encryption is better still. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iraqi, and possibly also Afghan, militants are using commercial software to eavesdrop on U.S. Predators, other unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, and even piloted…
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Google’s ‘Meaning of Open’
Link to: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
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SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar
Avatar Review by Greg Egan