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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,067 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The secret guild of Silicon Valley
A couple of weeks ago, I was drinking beer in San Francisco with friends when someone quipped: “You have too many hipsters, you won’t scale like that. Hire some fat guys who know C++.” It’s funny, but it got me thinking. Who are the “fat guys who know C++”, or as someone else put it, “theContinue reading "the secret…
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EU court: Reverse engineering OK, API not protected by (c) and more
This case (SAS v WPL) has a lot in common with the Oracle v Google case in the US.
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Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment
An east London estate, where 700 people live, has received leaflets saying a "Higher Velocity Missile system" could be placed on a water tower. ...
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Qwest CEO: NSA Punished Qwest for Refusing to Participate in Illegal Surveillance--Pre-9/11!
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts (log-in required) worth hundreds of...
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Harvard puts metadata for 12M library items into the public domain
(Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”) Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliograp…
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This Is 2016 Not 2012
Her eyebrows knot themselves. A pencil grates back and forth on her legal pad. Scratch. Scratch. My back itches; a tiny incessant itch that demands more at
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The War On RSS
John Gruber was right, when pointing to Dan Frakes’ review of the Mail app in Mountain Lion, to highlight the fact that the application drops support for RSS (he calls it an “interesting omission”, which is both correct and understated). It is indeed the most interesting aspect of the review, even though it’s buried…
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Shouldn't Robots Be Doing My Taxes By Now?
Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants…
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The Slow Web Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980). (Source: https://www.youtube.com/) The slow web started as a vague idea framed as a joke. When we put our site out into the world on January 2, 2011, we only proces
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Getting around the London 2012 branding police
The Guardian reported the other day on the London 2012 Olympics branding police who ensure that words like London, 2012 or Games aren't be...
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Physicist Uses Math to Beat Traffic Ticket
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
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Of Booze and Brogrammers
There's been a little bit of noise about the culture of "hard partying" at programmer conferences. Ryan complains about binge drinking , a...
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What Amazon's ebook strategy really means
It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.
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On Anonymity
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…
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Community and Diversity
[I hope that it’s obvious from what follows that this is a statement of personal opinion, not an official Mozilla document.]
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Testing like the TSA
When developers first discover the wonders of test-driven development, it’s like gaining entrance to a new and better world with less stress and insecurity. It truly is a wonderful experience well worth celebrating. But internalizing the benefits of testing is only the first step to enlighten…
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“She doesn’t deserve to be alive”
What is success? When do you reach it? Is life different? Are you happy? And if it's not the shining golden star that it ought to be, is it still worth it?
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Experiment: Living Without A Home Internet Connection
I moved into a new apartment at the start of April, and decided to try an experiment: not having an internet connection. When I tell people that I don’t have internet, they assume that it’s because I…