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Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling
YouTube resolution down again? Through a collaboration with another Massachusetts university, this Northeastern team unveils exactly who’s responsible.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 597 posts.
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The strength of a monopoly can be guessed at by calling customer support
If you were an alien hovering above planet earth on a quick visit and trying to find out quickly which were its most dominant companies, you could probably do worse than try to reach their customer…
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How to Name a Baby (2013)
Meet the Name Fad. In 30 years, the names Natalie, Chelsea, Samantha, and Lindsay will sound how Nancy, Cheryl, Susan, and Linda do today. And in 60 years, the names Ethan, Cody, Brandon, and Matthew will be Earl, Chester, Bernard, and Melvin.
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The Major Urban Revolution of Minor Transportation Means
Electric bikes and scooters have enormous advantages for short urban trips. How will they change our cities? When Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator in 1852, he never imagined skyscrapers.
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New “Terrorist Content” Regulations: A Grim Day for Digital Rights in Europe
Despite waves of calls and emails from European Internet users, the European Parliament today voted to accept the principle of a universal pre-emptive copyright filter for content-sharing sites, as well as the idea that news publishers should have the right to sue others for quoting news items...
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Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this...
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Bullshit Job Notes
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not…
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Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back
Today, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the internet: text messages like...
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Cancer
Cancers are one of the leading causes of death globally. Are we making progress against them?
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Big Debt Crises
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares his unique template for how debt crises work.
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The Effectiveness of Publicly Shaming Bad Security
Here's how it normally plays out: It all begins when a company pops up online and makes some sort of ludicrous statement related to their security posture, often as part of a discussion on a public social media platform such as Twitter. Shortly thereafter, the masses descend on said
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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
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Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace2018147 points118 commentsTech Industry & Business details
China’s debt problems have emerged so much more rapidly and severely this year than in the past that a growing number of analysts believe that this may be the year that China’s economy breaks. There is no question that China will have a difficult adjustment, but it is likely to take the form of a long process rather…
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Who Wrote the Anti-Trump New York Times Op-Ed? Using Tidytext
Like a lot of people, I was intrigued by “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, an anonymous New York Times op-ed written by a “senior official in the Trump administration”. And like many data scientists, I was curious about what role text mining could play.
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EU copyright reform: the facts
Ahead of the crucial EU copyright vote on 12 Sept., we set the facts straight and explain exactly what the new rules will mean for the internet in Europe.
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But Rich People Live Here, So We Can't Be Going Broke
If your growth strategy only works as long as wealthy people live in your town, your growth strategy is deeply fragile.
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Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook
Just over half of Facebook users have adjusted privacy settings in the past year. Around four-in-ten have taken a break from checking for several weeks or more.
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An effort to bring computer science to all US high schools
Amazon employees accelerate effort to bring computer science to all U.S. high schools.
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Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system
This post will probably only make sense to those deeply involved in Mastodon and the fediverse. So if that’s not your thing, or you’re not interested in issues…
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Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?
Epistemic Status: Resident Expert I’m a little late on this, which was an old promise to Robin Hanson (not that he asked for it). I was motivated to deal with this again by the launch of Augu…
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New Evidence That Lead Exposure Increases Crime (2017)
Jennifer Doleac reviews recent research that found exposure to lead poisoning led to higher crime rates.
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Can Beethoven send takedown requests?
Imagine you are a teacher at a public school, and you want to use a free recording of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in your classroom. As an author of music textbooks and a music theory professor, I am always looking for creative ways to develop teaching materials as Open Educational Resources (oer-musik.de), so that…
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F-35 Program Cutting Corners to “Complete” Development
Officials Altering Paperwork Instead of Pursuing Actual Fixes
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Bullshit Jobs
A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor’s note for back pain or something. Usually it’s a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work …
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Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility
Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into. I’m going to pick up where I left off there. For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me). In red, you have the positions that a company...