The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
We know from the Snowden documents (and other sources) that the NSA taps the Internet backbone through secret agreements with major US telcos., but the US government still hasn’t admitted it. In late August, the Obama administration declassified a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Footnote 3…
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland.
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
Patent reform is heating up in Congress. Today House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte released a second discussion draft aimed at preventing abusive patent troll litigation. Chairman Goodlatte has suggested he will move quickly to hold a hearing and committee vote on this legislation....
(Please note corrections after the post) Today I will delete my LinkedIn account. I say I will instead of I have because I do not know how LinkedIn’s account settings work; deleting my accou…
Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people—including President Obama—discounted the seriousness of the NSA’s actions by saying that it’s just metadata. Lots and lots…
[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness] I. Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “…
One of the most detailed pictures to date of how the US government uses airline reservations to target illegal searches is provided by documents released recently by the US government as part of an agreement to settle a lawsuit brought by David House , an activist with the Pvt. Manning Support Network .
Ivan Jakobović with his “water-powered car”. Because gas is so expensive, he modified his car to run on water.
Verizon has now on multiple occasions refused to connect my Google Nexus 7 LTE tablet, though the device was publicized widely as working on Verizon and...
Cross-disciplinary team from Harvard University and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute brings novel therapeutic cancer vaccine to human clinical trials
Dear Reader, The first set of publications based on Edward Snowden’s files were concerned with surveillance of internet communication h...
NSA, GCHQ, Prism, FISA, Project Bullrun, Sigint. After Edward Snowden, former CIA and NSA employee, started revealing how massively, intensely and easily we are all being spied upon by the intelligence agencies of various governments, the terms above have suddenly been spending a great deal more time in the media…
We all learned this in DARE class. About the rats in a cage who can self-administer morphine who get addicted to the stuff, and then just hit that lever until they die. A seemingly keystone...
For many years, i've been convinced that programming needs to move forward and abandon the Algol family of languages that, still today, dampens the field. And that that forward direction has been signalled for decades by (mostly) functional, possibly dyna...
We’re told studies have proven that drugs like heroin and cocaine instantly hook a user. But it isn’t that simple – little-known experiments over 30 years ago tell a very different tale. Drugs are …
Earlier today AMC announced they have secured the prequel to Breaking Bad, a show based on the popular supporting character, Lawyer Saul Goodman. What was particularly fascinating was that an artic…
Social Fixer for Facebook is a FREE browser extension that fixes annoyances, adds features, and enhances existing functionality to make Facebook more fun and efficient
I’m a smart guy. I’m not bragging. It’s not like I deserve any credit for being smart. I didn’t do anything to make that happen. I’m also tall, but nobody compliments me on that. (Good job being tall!) Intelligence is an immutable characteristic that I have at times capitalized on and at other times let […]
