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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Taking a Look at Mastodon
I’ve been a Twitter user and fan since 2007. With Twitter’s future looking a bit grim, I started looking around if there’s another place to go.
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An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.
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Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
...but decentralization is right behind it.
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Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think
It's myth-busting time! The world's richest and largest city is cheaper and roomier than you think.
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The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant
Sweet, sweet humidity.
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Meta Myths
Meta deserves a bit of a discount off of its recent highs, but a number of myths about its business have caused the market to over-react.
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Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
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Somali Law (2013)
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
As you might remember from a few months ago , there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy , including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was…
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Old tech is haunted
We're making scientists and ghost-hunters kiss
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Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
Explore the diversity of wildlife across the planet. What are species threatened with? What can we do to prevent biodiversity loss?
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Extracting Zooming Shots from 600 Hrs of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage
In November of 2021, an anonymous source leaked 600 hours of police aerial surveillance footage to the non-profit transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets .
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PayPal’s Objectionable Terms Are Back, $2500 Fines for Content They Don’t Like
Two weeks ago Paypal introduced language into its terms and conditions that allowed them to withdraw $2500 from your account for each time they believed you "promot[ed] misinformation" or you sent, posted or published "messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene…
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Where did all the “reject” buttons come from?
More and more websites have added an option to say “no” to cookies and other tracking- as foreseen by the GDPR. Where did this trend come from?
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Test scores are not irrelevant
Some claims that test scores don’t predict college success don’t add up.
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Stop Writing Twitter Threads
If you've clicked on the links, you've probably noticed a pattern: they are all Twitter threads. And Twitter threads are an absolute abomination.
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Bumble releases open-source A.I. feature to help combat unsolicited nudes
Bumble has made an open-source version of our Private Detector™ A.I. technology available on GitHub.
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Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies
Or, how we lose knowledge and technologies. And what we can do about it.
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Australia's weird little time zone (2008)
One tiny corner of Australia recognises "Australian Central Western Standard Time" (ACWST), an unofficial zone based on the quarter hour.
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Fake Books
Machine-generated books are here. I bought one by accident.
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The Social Recession: By the Numbers
Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.
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Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
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Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022cited by 16History & Retro Computing details
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…