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Solar storm risk and EMP attacks
A Q&A style dialogue to separate fact from fiction.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 913 posts.
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Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic
In a letter recently published in a new book, A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong, a teacher wrote a letter to the first human to set foot on the Moon a
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Apple gave me the Hey treatment back in 2014
I’ve been reading the news this week about Hey, Apple, and in app purchases. Many people have offered their takes on the situation, and I can’t help but feel déjà vu.
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We need to do the math, even on “small” projects
It’s easy for “maintaining” our public investments to become “upgrading” our public investments. Especially when there is money available. And especially when that money is borrowed.
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Covid-19: The T Cell Story
When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does…
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Employers steal billions from workers’ paychecks each year: Survey data show millions of workers are paid less than the minimum wage, at significant cost to taxpayers and state economies
This report assesses the prevalence and magnitude of one form of wage theft—minimum wage violations (workers being paid at an effective hourly rate below the binding minimum wage)—in the 10 most populous U.S. states. We find that, in these states, 2.4 million workers lose $8 billion annually (an average of $3,300 per…
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Apple Is Trying to Shut Down Hey
Apple deserves the antitrust scrutiny that they’re getting for their anti-competitive App Store policies.
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Dear Apple: Here’s How to Stop the Antitrust Investigations
A Five-Step Guide from the Developers You Sherlocked. It’s in Apple’s best interest to be proactive and tackle the antitrust problem itself rather than waiting for the government to step in. To help Tim Cook get ahead of the scrutiny, we’ve compiled some reasonable suggestions for Apple that don’t require government…
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How Can You Help the Internet Archive?
With the Internet Archive being mentioned prominently in the news for the past couple of weeks, we've had thousands of people discuss us in social media, and contact us directly with strong concerns and worries. Above all, many want, in some way, to "help" and have asked us what they can do, if anything.While your
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Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early
Within a few days of the announcement that libraries, schools and colleges across the nation would be closing due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library to provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual…
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The American Press Is Destroying Itself
A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press
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The antitrust case against Google
State and federal authorities are reportedly preparing to bring antitrust charges against Google. We talked to Yale SOM’s Fiona Scott Morton about the company's dominant role in online advertising and how it limits competition.
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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier failed to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.
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Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn
Ruminations on outsourcing our values
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The social obligation to be bad at things
This page has moved to https://drmaciver.com/notebook/2020/02/the-social-obligation-to-be-bad-at-things/ .
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A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition
We’re implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology. We will continue to allow organizations like Thorn, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Marinus Analytics to use Amazon Rekognition to help rescue human trafficking victims…
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No Recent Automation Revolution
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning.
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Potential organized fraud in ACM/IEEE computer architecture conferences
Many of you are likely to have seen the post by Huixiang’s Voice on Medium showing that Huixiang Chen’s laptop contained downloads of most…
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A Future Without MPEG
Table of contents Introduction The situation today The competitors What is/will be available What the market offers Licensing of other media coding standards My views on the next steps of media coding standards A disclosure My forecast So, what will happen next? And now? Introduction My plan this week was to talk…
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We’ve built a towering pile of shite
This a rant, written at midnight, after battling software errors. Set your profanity filters accordingly. I despair over the state of software engineering - specifically, stability. We seem to have lost the understanding that computers are there to do the hard work for us. And I don't think we ever believed in a…
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