The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
A 28-year-old Kansas man was shot and killed by police officers on the evening of Dec. 28 after someone fraudulently reported a hostage situation ongoing at his home. The false report was the latest in a dangerous hoax known as “ swatting ,” wherein the perpetrator falsely reports a dangerous situation at an address…
anecdotes from working over a minecraft economy
Former philosophy professor and successful humorist Dennis Fried sent me some poignant comments on my piece in The Atlantic. Reprinted with Fried’s permission. Dear Dr. Caplan, I just read your article in Atlantic magazine and was blown away by the brutal honesty displayed there, especially coming from someone whose…
Introduction Did you know that piracy is about making money? Most people don’t seem to be aware of that. Piracy is about money. It’s serious business. It doesn’t have to be though…
According to reports published Tuesday evening by Politico, a group of surveillance hawks in the House of Representatives is trying to ram through a bill that would extend mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. We expect a vote to happen on the House floor as early as tomorrow, which...
Open Source Freelancer
This post is by Guy Shrubsole. Updated 16th Dec 2017 with post-script on Birmingham’s secret tunnels. The existence of a secret network of Cold War-era tunnels beneath central London can be …
The following tweet has been making the rounds on social media: Notice that since the Democrats won overall, it would be impossible for Republicans to win all seven districts, no matter how the map…
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Tim Ferriss, and most recently Sam Altman (but see his clarification) think there are too many opinions…
The consequence for minor lapses in judgment shouldn’t be death.
Update – the fake reviews featured below were removed shortly after this post blew up on Hacker News.
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS) in…
As the U.S. Federal Communications Commission prepares to rollback net neutrality protections, the Canadian government has used the controversy to double down on its support for net neutrality safeguards, linking it to democracy, equality, and freedom of expression. I've written several posts on how the U.S. decision…
Ranking the cities and states and release the most toxins into the environment.
With people spending more time on social media, many rightly wonder whether that time is good for us. Do people connect in meaningful ways online? Or are they simply consuming trivial updates and polarizing memes at the expense of time with loved ones?
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
Today the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality — a terrible step for the future of a free and open internet and for…
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel...
Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents
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