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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 695 posts.
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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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EFF Sues FBI For Access to Facial-Recognition Records
San Francisco - As the FBI is rushing to build a "bigger, faster and better" biometrics database, it's also dragging its feet in releasing information related to the program's impact on the American public. In response, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a lawsuit to compel the...
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Pandora and Royalties
Enjoy SiriusXM's channels, podcasts, and articles which are dedicated to bringing you the hottest Celebrity, Entertainment, Music and Sports news.
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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…
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Can Apple read your iMessages?
About a year ago I wrote a short post urging Apple to publish the technical details of iMessage encryption. I’d love tell you that Apple saw my influential crypto blogging and fell all over t…
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Is Wine Bullshit?
How should we understand the robust findings that suggest that the price of wine is not only uncorrelated with how much people enjoy it, but that the different tastes we describe in wine may all be in our heads?
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Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh
Those dicks at Google are shutting off Reader at the end of the week, and the world is in a mad tizzy trying to find a feed reader that will continue to function. First a word on why it is stultifyingly stupid that this is even a problem in the first place: I want to read my feeds on three devices: a desktop computer…
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Malibu homeowners foiled by $30K Kickstarter campaign
Can you believe it? Malibu homeowners intentionally obscure public beach access areas with fake signs and hidden access. This is not only ridiculously selfish, it is illegal. Enter this...
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How to travel around the world for a year
While my last post covered my previous year traveling, writing and programming [http://old.alexmaccaw.com/posts/traveling_writing_programming], this article will go into the specifics of planning your own round the world trip, including flights, costs, activities and accommodation. I'll show you how affordable…
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Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’…
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This is a web page
We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things.
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What happened to innovation?
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the pace of innovation has slowed, and if so, what that means. After some particularly brutal pitches that felt like Saturday Night Live parodies of...
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Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the…
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Finding Sociopaths on Facebook
On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways…
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Blowback from the NSA surveillance.
There’s one piece of blowback that isn’t being discussed—aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade—and that’s how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US’s role in Internet governance. Ron Deibert makes this point: But…
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Facebook Is Not Blocking Tor Deliberately
A number of users have noticed that Facebook is blocking connections from the Tor network....
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The Constitution Applies When the Government Bans Americans From the Skies
The government does not have the unchecked authority to place individuals on a secret blacklist without providing them any meaningful opportunity to object, the ACLU argued in a brief filed last Friday with the federal district court in Oregon.
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Evidence that the NSA Is Storing Voice Content, Not Just Metadata
Interesting speculation that the NSA is storing everyone’s phone calls, and not just metadata. Definitely worth reading. I expressed skepticism about this just a month ago. My assumption had always been that everyone’s compressed voice calls is just too much data to move around and store. Now, I don’t know. There’s a…
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