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The media's lab leak fiasco
A huge fuckup, with perhaps not-so-huge policy stakes
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Strong Towns Has Filed a Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering
The Minnesota board that regulates engineering licenses is abusing their power in order to stifle the free speech of Charles Marohn and retaliate against the Strong Towns movement for their advocacy on transportation, infrastructure, and engineering reform. Strong Towns has filed suit in federal cou
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Benzene detected in many sunscreen products
Learn how Valisure’s work in pharmaceutical quality and transparency was recognized in the U.S. Senate Aging Committee report, highlighting their collaboration with the Department of Defense and commitment to innovation.
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One week of Libera Chat
The state of the network after one week of operation.
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The end of the pandemic is near
All epidemics end, even the Black Death and Spanish Flu. But it won’t be abrupt, and mine may end before yours does.
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Master List of Logical Fallacies (2018)
Fallacies are fake or deceptive arguments, "junk cognition," that is, arguments that seem irrefutable but prove nothing. Fallacies often seem superficially sound and they far too often retain immense persuasive power even after being clearly exposed as false. Like epidemics, fallacies sometimes "burn through" entire…
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Users post more falsehoods after others correct them: study
Attempting to politely correct misinformation on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a study co-authored by MIT scholars.
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Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
A whirlwind tour through the bucket-load of fail that is Urbit.
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What lies beneath: Evidence from leaked account data on offshore banking use
Matthew Collin uses account data leaked from an Isle of Man bank to investigate the characteristics of individuals and firms that store their money in tax havens.
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Freenode IRC operators now engaging in routine abuses of power
There have been several allegations of this since the handover of the Freenode infrastructure to its new custodians, but I can now provide a first-hand account of one incident — because I am the victim of it.
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Freesound just reached 500K Creative Commons sounds
In our recent 2020 in numbers blog post we predicted that we would reach 500k sound uploads at some point in 2021 and… it has just happened! At some point during the past weekend, the number of sounds which are available for download in Freesound has surpassed half a million. Note that by sounds which are available…
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My Resignation from Freenode
As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much…
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Welcome to Libera Chat
A warm welcome to a new IRC network!
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Poor in Tech
I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because nobody else ate the Hot Cheetos that were stocked in our free snack kitchen. Seaweed snacks were always empty. Nobody had those telltale…
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Tax Evasion at the Top of the Income Distribution: Theory and Evidence
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post merge. Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which...
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Identify a Facebook user by his phone number despite privacy settings set
The goal of this blog is to share write-ups about bugs i have found in Facebook and reported to them under the Facebook bug bounty program.
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Some Night-Shift Workers May Have a 300% Higher Risk of Car Crashes
Researchers at the University of Missouri College of Engineering also examined the relationship between vehicle crashes and two other sleep disorders, sleep apnea and insomnia.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
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The Achilles Heel of the Coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2 is critically dependent on a special mechanism for the production of its proteins. A collaborative team led by a research group at ETH Zurich obtained molecular insights into this process and demonstrated that it can be inhibited by chemical compounds, thereby significantly reducing viral replication in…
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I have a lot to say about Signal’s Cellebrite hack
This blog post is based off of a talk I gave on May 12, 2021 at the Stanford Computer Science Department’s weekly lunch talk series on computer security topics. Full disclosure: I’ve done some consulting work for Signal, albeit not on anything like this issue. (I kinda doubt