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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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Lessons I learned building an MPs' expenses crowdsourcing app for the Guardian
As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team …
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How to destroy the earth
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency
This is interesting: Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and…
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Googling for Sociopaths
One of the best things about capitalism is the way it handles sociopaths. Major executives look up to Alexander the Great and apparently try to follow in his footsteps. But instead of leading a murderous campaign across Asia, they decide to make something people want: newspapers and movies and television shows. True…
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The impact of language choice on github projects
Although I spend a lot of my play-time fooling about with other languages, my professional and released code consists of Python, C, C++ and, alas, Javascript. I've lived in this tiny corner of the magic garden of modern software development for 10 years, and I'm itching to strike out in a different direction for my…
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Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
Regarding Randall Stross’s piece in The New York Times claiming the problem isn’t AT&T’s network, but rather the iPhone’s hardware.
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Schneier: The Value of Privacy
Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…
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Adieu google
The first thing I searched for in Google, back in 1999, was probably "linux", followed by my name.
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Richard Dawkins: Viruses of the Mind
Center for the Study of Complex Systems at U-M LSA offers interdisciplinary research and education in nonlinear, dynamical, and adaptive systems.
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Eric Raymond on "Hiding the Decline, Part 1"
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
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Challenging the MLS Monopoly
Personal website for Ryan McGreal
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Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds
If you allow players in an online world to penalize each other, you open the door to extortion: One of the features that supported user socialization in the game was the ability to declare that another user was a trusted friend. The feature involved a graphical display that showed the faces of users who had declared…
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Universities and Economic Growth
Value of $120,000 spent at Emerson College: I hired a summer intern, who had finished three years studying film and video production at Emerson College, to work with me on a series of videos for people learning to fly helicopters. He brought his own equipment to the first day of filming, including some "work lights"…
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Parenting in the age of Paranoia: A Small Manifesto
We live in a contracting world, with diminishing options to travel far from your home and meet people of unfamiliar backgrounds- if you’re a child.