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If – A Poem by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,050 posts.
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Germany: Data retention to be abolished
According to the German Minister of Justice data retention or "the storage of telecommunications data without any reason" could soon come to an end.
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How often people copy and paste from Stack Overflow
April Fool's may be over, but once we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized there was also an opportunity to learn about how people use our site. Here’s what we found.
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Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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GCC: The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not do “bounty”
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A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Down the Rabbit Hole: The world of estranged parents' forums (2015)
This page doesn’t apply to all estranged parents, only to estranged parents who are members of estranged parents’ forums. Read why.
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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory , David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely…
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Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
Google Maps is incredibly detailed and useful. But Google uses it for tracking and deliver ads. Should you contribute for free to build its monopoly?
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Superhighway84 – a Usenet-inspired decentralized internet discussion system
Superhighway84 is a USENET-inspired decentralized internet discussion system, featuring a retro text user interface and powered by IPFS and OrbitDB.
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Ontario bans non-competes and creates right to disconnect from work
On November 30, 2021, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 27, Working for Workers Act, 2021[1] an omnibus bill introduced by the Progressive Conservatives which amends a number of employment-related statutes. The amendments received Royal Assent on December 2, 2021; however, different parts of the Bill will come into…
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37% of the world’s population have still never used the internet
New data from ITU suggest a ‘COVID connectivity boost’ – but the world’s poorest are still being left far behind, with 2.9 billion people still offline.
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The Importance of Price Signals
Originally published: December 2021 When price inflation occurs, it can be a very challenging time for everyone. In that type of environment, prices of goods and services often go up faster than wages, and the public and policymakers wish to constrain them. Historically, when price inflation becomes rampant…
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You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
There are defences against badvertising on the internet, and you should use them. But there are defences against bad advertising in real life too, and you should use them too. Put badvertising in its place: nowhere!
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Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
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Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
Readers with long memories may recall the brief, inglorious UK fuel shortage of a few weeks ago, which was mostly caused by the rush to refuel for fear the pumps would run dry. Some petrol stations…
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Amazon Introduces Re:Post, a “Stack Overflow” for AWS
The internet is an excellent resource for well-intentioned guidance and answers. However, it can sometimes be hard to tell if what you’re reading is, in fact, advice you should follow. Also, some users have a preference toward using a single, trusted online community rather than the open internet to provide them with…
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The longest train journey in the world in 2021
IMPORTANT : this blog post is correct as of 15 December 2021, and all the text below is unchanged since then. At that time two borders - Russia to China, and China to Laos - could not be crossed due to COVID. The outbreak of war in Ukraine has also meant that trains
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The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior
“Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.”
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Walking the World: Bucharest
A city of the grandiose, filled with the humble
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Turkey's Financial Crisis
Earlier this week, Mohamed El-Erian was lost for words.
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The Sucker Complex
One is killed every minute