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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 658 posts.
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The Math Myth
Math professor David Edwards sent me this short essay on mathematical education. Printed with his permission. The Math Myth Themath myth is the myth that the future of the American economy is dependent upon the masses having higher mathematics skills. This myth goes back to at least Sputnik, when the Russians were…
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EFF to Court: Government Must Inform People That It’s Accessing Their Data
Seattle, Washington—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution when it fails to notify people that it has accessed or examined their private communications stored by Internet providers in the cloud. EFF is supporting...
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Hunger and Undernourishment
What are the consequences of undernourishment and how can we make progress against hunger and undernourishment?
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One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: 2016 Report
Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030
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Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
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Russia's “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model
Russia's propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it does not commit to consistency.
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The piracy paradox at Udemy (2015)
My Pluralsight courses get pirated all the time. I used to have Google alerts for them but frankly, the flood of emails I’d get each day just didn’t justify the “return” I’d get by forwarding them on to the Pluralsight piracy folks. I ended up rationalising it
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Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster
This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.
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The NSA Is Hoarding Vulnerabilities
The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the Internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others’ computers. Those vulnerabilities aren’t being reported, and…
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NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender
Ahmed Mansoor was targeted by NSO Group, an Israel-based “cyber war” company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product.
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Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation
Of all the objections I get from people about why they can’t ride a bike to get around, perhaps the most frustrating is the claim that bicycling is too dangerous. According to this line of re…
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Why the NSA Dump Isn't from an Insider
Between Lies and Bad Analysis
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Looking ahead for WhatsApp
Today, we’re updating WhatsApp’s terms and privacy policy for the first time in four years, as part of our plans to test ways for people to communicate with businesses in the months ahead. The updated documents also reflect that we’ve joined Facebook and that we've recently rolled out many new features, like…
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Language contains human biases, and so will machines trained on language corpora
I have a new draft paper with Aylin Caliskan-Islam and Joanna Bryson titled Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases. We show empirically that natural language necessarily contains human biases, and the paradigm of training machine learning on language corpora means that…
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Don't Read the Comments
I sent this email to the current YC batch this morning: I've talked to some of you who are really bummed about negative press coverage or online comments about your company. Often this takes...
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It’s time to bring more realistic models of human behaviour into economic policy
David Halpern. The Centre for Central Banking Studies recently hosted their annual Chief Economists Workshop, whose theme was “What can policymakers learn from other disciplines”. In this guest po…
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Amateur Radio Sleuthing Pins Down Source of Strange RF Interference
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
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Fighting Cancer
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about how penny auction sites make you money. As a reaction, some readers sent me links to day trading brokers that promise easy returns. These brokers allow private investors to hold stocks or currencies positions for a short time which makes it possible to speculate on small…
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Penny Auctions
Unless you use an ad blocker, you probably notice ads for penny auction sites from time to time. They usually advertise with sketchy messages like “iPhone sold for $14.21.” They can sell iPhones such low prices because of their unusual auction system where each bid increases the auction price by only one cent. This…
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An American Doctor Experiences the NHS Again
Two years ago I wrote about my experience in a London emergency department with my son, Victor. That post has since been viewed > 450,000 times. There are over 800 comments with no trolls (a fea…
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The meaning of trust in the age of Airbnb
I am on holiday in Bavaria, where, in between the beer and schnitzels, I have been contemplating the nature of trust. A rather old-fashioned guest house happily took our reservation and let us run …
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