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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory
<p>Would you believe that there is a conspiracy theory about the way we tune musical instruments? And that this theory even involves the Nazis, chakras, and whatnot? No? Then sit down and enjoy
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HN comments are underrated
HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously…
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Why Haters Hate: Kierkegaard Explains the Psychology of Trolling in 1847
“Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence.”
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Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it less secure
Recently, account takeovers, email hacking, and targeted phishing attacks have been all over the news. Hacks of various politicians, allegedly carried out by Russian hackers, have yielded troves of data. Despite the supposed involvement of state-sponsored agents, some hacks were not reliant on complex zero-day…
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Facial Recognition’s Threat to Privacy Is Worse Than Anyone Thought
Before all of this ever went down In another place, another town You were just a face in the crowd You were just a face in the crowd Out in the street walking around A face in the crowd -Tom Petty If we don’t speak up now, the days when we can walk around with our heads held high without fear of...
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U.S. lags behind peer countries in mobility
The notion that anyone in America who is willing and able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can achieve significant upward mobility is deeply embedded in U.S. society. Conventional wisdom holds that class barriers in the United States are the lowest among the world’s advanced economies. Motivating this…
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The 2016 Election
I am endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before, but I'm making an exception this year, because this election is exceptional. Donald Trump...
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Peter Thiel, YC, and hard decisions
Diversity and inclusion are hard, especially in tech. Doing them right means agreeing on values, setting standards, calling out bad…
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Finland: New surveillance law threatens fundamental rights (2015)
Finnish EDRi member Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi) is gravely concerned over a draft law on Internet surveillance. The bill that the country’s current government is in the process of preparing will grant the military and the Finnish Security Intelligence Service (Supo) the authority to conduct electronic mass…
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The Intellectual Yet Idiot
(Chapter in Skin in the game )
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What $50 buys you at the Huaqiangbei electronics market in Shenzhen, China
We’re building the Model 01, a hackable ergonomic keyboard with mechanical keyswitches, programmable RGB LEDs, opensource firmware, and a…
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
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Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory
Law to be introduced in 2017 The use of open standards is to be made mandatory for public administrations in the Netherlands. A law proposed by MP Astrid Oosenbrug was adopted by the Lower House of...
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Measuring how bad Twitter is
My last blog post (exposing Twitter's excessive costs) prompted horror story emails on Twitter. But the best thing sent to me was a finan...
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Why Unicode Won’t Work on the Internet (2001)
Linguistic, Political, and Technical Limitations.
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World Population Growth
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
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Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs
So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved…
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Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive blocked in Turkey following leaks
Turkey has blocked access to Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and partially restricted Google Drive cloud file sharing services popular on mobile phones as well as in education, business, legal and press industries, ...
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A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man
In 1986, at the very first Burn, a crowd of complete strangers gathered around the Man once it was lit it on fire. Nobody had invited them. They didn’t know anything about the 10 Principles, or understand what The Man was...