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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 89 posts.
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The Untold Millions
The media is biased towards stories that want to be told. This is especially true about the media covering the web world. It’s much easier to write a story about Facebook, Google, Youtube, or any of the other limelight stories where much of the juicy details are willingly shared. We have s…
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Debunking Daniel Tammet
Lately I've been encouraged to make more of my posts unlocked. I only do that under certain circumstances, but I feel this is an important occasion because I believe I have spotted a hoax and that I am unusually qualified to unmask it. I just watched The Boy With the Incredible Brain , a video that…
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A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)
In How to Do Philosophy , Paul Graham claims that “judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.” His point is that philosophy per se is structurally flawed. How?
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I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers—and televisions and iPods and everything else—to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your…
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Hacking your food supply
A perennial problem for my wife and I run into while bootstrapping our business is the lack of time. It seems like the daily grind of cooking, cleaning and shopping tends to eat up most of our available time that we have.
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Schneier reviews: Here Comes Everybody
In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don’t people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market’s transaction…
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The Perils of JavaSchools
Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…
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Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
Update, 2017-09-25 Hi! This essay is undergoing a long-overdue rewrite. In the meantime, consider my 2015 follow-up essay, Obergefell v. Hodges: the database engineering perspective....
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Google account disabled for 6+ days. Some thoughts
Mibbit is a fully featured IRC Client. Allowing you to interact realtime with your friends. Chat, play games, colaborate on projects together and more.
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Hacking Education
I spent a lot of time on this blog in the past month exhorting everyone to give teaching tools to the neediest public schools. I did that because education is possibly the most important thing we can do for our world and our children. But I also believe the the public school system in this […]
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Edward O. Wilson: Marx was right, he had the wrong species
Among many other things, Edward Wilson is a myrmecologist and two times Pulitzer-prize winner. There is a picture taken by him of an ant holding between its mandibles a banner with the words: 'Onward Sociobiolo�gy!'. Following the publication in 1975 of his book Sociobi�ology, the New Synthesis , he became both to…
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Grad School Enrollment vs. Unemployment Rate
Link to Piled Higher and Deeper
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Bank Robber Recruits Accomplices With Fake Job Ad on Craigslist
Now this is clever: “I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” said Mike, who saw a Craigslist ad last week looking for workers for a road maintenance project in Monroe. He said he inquired and was e-mailed back with instructions to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe at 11 a.m…
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