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Conquest of the Incas
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 992 posts.
782
What's Happening to Students?
Here's the latest news from the zombie wars
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Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Patty Smith.
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The Great Barefoot Running Hysteria of 2010
The year was 2010. “Ke$ha's Tik Tok” was topping the Billboard charts. Steve Jobs has just introduced a goofy new oversized iPhone called an “iPad”.
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Cottagecore Programmers
Every programmer I know has at some point longingly expressed how “[they] want to work with [their] hands”. Some say they wish they were a carpenter, some want to be in the fields on a farm, some want to raise chickens, or milk cows. It is however inevitable that I either hear someone say it or agree with it at some…
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I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud
This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed…
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Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?
Millions are exploring European alternatives for privacy-friendly tech. Which are the top categories, top tools, and the global demand driving this shift.
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63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide (2024)
Not one cuisine, not eight, but many more. Our best shot at a comprehensive-ish guide.
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The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
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The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
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All clothing is handmade (2022)
Writing about an art quilt I made with reused textiles and what I hope it reminds us about the clothing that we wear and the people who created it.
792
A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
Dating back to at least early 2023, a bizarre and alarming technical glitch started popping up in some organizations’ online surveys and forms.
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France rejects backdoor mandate
In a moment of clarity after initially moving forward a deeply flawed piece of legislation, the French National Assembly has done the right thing: it rejected a dangerous proposal that would have gutted end-to-end encryption in the name of fighting drug trafficking.
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The Road Not Taken Is Guaranteed Minimum Income
The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.
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Congestion Pricing Is a Policy Miracle
Which is exactly why Trump wants to get rid of it
796
The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”
There's a corner of the Internet where people have been reclaiming their digital independence by hosting their own websites and promoting the idea of owning your own content. It's called the IndieWeb. The community has its own website , IRC channels, social media presence, etc. as well
797
The F-35 as a Subscription Service
by Benjamin Cook (into by Tom Cooper)
798
The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-Changing Sci-Fi Larp
A conversation with lead producer Laura Kröger on the making of Odysseus and what it would take to become a permanent institution.
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How popular is Donald Trump?
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
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Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities
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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The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)
The Internet Slum
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Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow
As the administration does its best to hide public records from the public, Wired magazine is stepping up to help stem the secrecy
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"Wait, not like that": Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
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The good times in tech are over
For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of…
806
How many artists' careers did the Beatles kill?
The sinister side of rock 'n' roll
807
The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment
Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.
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The curious surge of productivity in U.S. restaurants
We document that, after remaining almost constant for almost 30 years, real labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged over 15% during the COVID pandemic. This surge has persisted even as many conditions have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Using mobile phone data tracking visits and spending at more than 100,000…
809
Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
810
Hidden Messages in Emojis and Hacking the US Treasury
On December 30th, while most of us were preparing for a New Year’s Eve celebration, the US Treasury was prepping a notice to lawmakers to notify them that their systems, which (obviously) contain highly sensitive, confidential data, had been compromised.