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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,129 posts.
Opera Mail – standalone mail client
With the release of Opera Next, Opera Mail takes its star turn as a dedicated service. This lean and mean email machine is lightweight, nimble and focused on one thing and one thing only – handling e-mail better than ever. Simple yet powerful, Opera Mail is designed to help you get the better of your […]
You commit three felonies a day
In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the governmen
1984
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire […]
Timelapse of a supercell near Booker, Texas
Still prints of this storm for purchase can be found on my gallery. Follow me on Instagram as well for storm photos and whatnot -> MikeOlbinski It took four years but I finally got it. A rotating supercell. And not just a rotating supercell, but one with insane structure and amazing movement. I’ve been visiting the...
Where “nothing to hide” fails as logic
Every April, I try to wade through mounds of paperwork to file my taxes. Like most Americans, I’m trying to follow the law and pay all of the taxes that I owe without getting screwed in the process. I try and make sure that every donation I made is backed by proof, every deduction is backed by logic and documentation…
Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the…
Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers
Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That’s everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted—for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This “metadata” allows the…
PRISM? Come to Israel to study our surveillance state
It seems that those who were astonished, abhorred, enraged or outraged from finding out that the National Security Agency (NSA) tracked millions of united states citizens and did so with the cooperation of numerous internet service providers, telecommunication companies and web-based hosting services had not even…
Feynman vs. The Abacus
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
Logic Programming is Underrated
Mark Engelberg wrote a very interesting post titled Logic Programming is Overrated . I take issue with a quite a few points made in that post and I would like to address a couple of them here.
The Internet Is a Surveillance State
Polish translation I’m going to start with three data points. One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks…
Thousands dead, millions deprived of civil liberties? (2001)
If we are not careful, the deadly attacks on New York and Washington will lead to far worse secondary damage, if the U.S. Congress adopts "preventive measures" that take away the freedom that America stands for.
Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go
I have always wanted to write an emulator. I made a half-hearted attempt in college but it never made it to a demo-able state. I also didn't want to write Yet Another Emulator. It should at least bring something new to the table. When I discovered LLVM , I felt like I finally had worthwhile idea for a project.
How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist?
Recent revelations about PRISM, the NSA’s massive program of surveillance of civilian communications have caused quite a stir. And rightfully so, as it appears that the agency has been grante…
How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases
Confession time: While I like to rationalize my blog’s recent silence with changing jobs and moving to a new city, the truth is, the single biggest drain on my free time lately has been Super…