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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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4chan hacker discusses the manipulation of the Time poll
There’s a scene toward the end of the book Contact by Carl Sagan, where the protagonist Ellie Arroway finds a Message embedded deep in the digits of PI. The Message is perhaps an artifact of …
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A Non-Local Revolution
Paul Graham has recently argued for two points: first, that tech startups will continue to collect in Silicon Valley . Second, that startups may represent a new economic phase , replacing the corporate ladder of old . Now he’s suggesting that these two effects combined might lead to a very local economic revolution .
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Boston College Campus Police: "Using Prompt Commands" May Be a Sign of Criminal Activity
On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash [pdf] and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-...
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Steve Yegge: Have you ever legalized marijuana?
It seems like there's actually a model we could use for legalizing marijuana. From 1919 to 1933 alcohol went from being legal to illegal back to legal again. It happened. Lots of people died when alcohol was illegal. More probably die now that it is legal. And technically, marijuana is legal in California for medical…
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Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
Get Satisfaction, a third-party customer service app/community, allows customers to offer feedback, make suggestions, get their questions answered, and generally get help with a product or service. A good idea Building support/community infrastructure is a pain point for a lot of companies. The…
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Anxiety, Depression, Technology, and Me
This is a personal story. I have never shared much of this. I am a regular blogger, but this felt too personal to write as myself. I neede...
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Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy.
Event sourcing is an excellent software design pattern. Instead of persisting current state of an asset and mutating it in place. An asset is represented by the events through its life cycle. When the current state of an asset is needed its re-computed from the events.
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Three Major Singularity Schools
( Originally appeared on the Machine Intelligence Research Institute blog, September 2007.)
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Faking votes on Hacker News
Hacker News is a site where users vote on links. When someone clicks on an up or down vote, their browser sends a GET request that looks like this: GET /vote?by= joesmith dir=upfor=8765309 A user can only vote if the by parameter matches their Hacker News login cookie. So for a third…
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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
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How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff?
We’ve been talking about the basic wonder of putting a price on your product for such a long time that it almost seems trite at this point. I certainly thought that point would have lost propulsion long ago, but I keep being surprised by the contrary. It seems that the web has been so thor…
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The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
Paul Graham's Hacker News is a great website to find interesting programming links and sane discussion. The site reflects a sort of post- Reddit sensibility; the design of HN was directly intended to address the shortcomings of programming.reddit.com from someone very much on the inside (Reddit was a Paul Graham Y…