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The Costs of Requiring Accounts
Should online communities require people to create accounts before participating? This question has been a source of disagreement among people who start or manage online communities for decades. Re…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,050 posts.
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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more…
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Microsoft and the Metaverse
Defining the Metaverse, and explaining why Microsoft is well-placed for the virtual reality opportunity
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ProctorU is dystopian spyware
As part of my MSc, I have to take an online exam. Obviously, this means I am highly likely to cheat by looking up things on Wikipedia or by having a bit of paper with notes on it. EVIL! So, the exam body requires me to install ProctorU. It's a service which lets someone watch you through your laptop camera while you…
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It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere
Monetary Policy 3 created a self-reinforcing demand explosion that is getting harder, not easier, for supply to keep up with.
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Shooting an Elephant (1936)
"[…] it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
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Culturally transmitted skills and values
Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we're on the same page (if you think that I should be using a different word for the concept, feel free to mentally…
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Six Palestinian organizations hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware
On 19 October 2021, Israeli Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, announced the designation of six leading Palestinian civil society organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as “terrorist organizations” under Israel’s Anti-Terrorism Law 2016. The groups named are Addameer; Al-Haq; Defense for Children …
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The Melancholy of Subculture Society (2019)
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
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American trains need more than railfan nostalgia
A review of "Amtrak, America's Railroad"
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Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
The most common method for producing crypto-assets requires enormous amounts of electricity and generates large CO2 emissions. Crypto-asset producers are keen to use more renewable energy, and they are increasing their presence in the Nordic region. Sweden needs the renewable energy targeted by crypto-asset producers…
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When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)
The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise , (this is an mp3 file) on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A . (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive…
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The promise and paradox of decentralization
Plus! Valuation Arbitrage; Labor Liquidity; Pricing Power; Diff Jobs
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How credit cards make money
Credit cards make money through net interest, interchange, fees, and marketing contributions.
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Fuck.com (1997)
Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.
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Our self imposed scarcity of nice places
Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” or “upscale”?
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Stop spending so much time being trolled by billionaire corps
As a kid, my parents would open the television set, and we would get to watch whatever the state television decided we would watch. It was a push model. Some experts pick the content you need and they deliver it to you. You have little say in the matter. There was one newspaper in my … Continue reading Stop spending…
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People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency
People who are both trustworthy and competent are most sought after when forming teams
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Trump’s new social media platform found using Mastodon code
From media reports and individual findings that various people have presented to us, it seems that the new social media platform owned by the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, so-called Truth Social, is using Mastodon’s source code with various visual adjustments. The platform has not formally…