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Betting on the Pope was the original prediction market
500 years before Polymarket, the Vatican fought to stop gambling on papal affairs. Should we worry that it’s back?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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DHS Quietly Testing Mandatory Facial Recognition of Passengers Exiting U.S
We’re all used to having to identify ourselves as we enter a country. It is the only way we can hope to have any attempt at a secure border. But, so-called “exit controls,” wher…
5463
Finding Sociopaths on Facebook
On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways…
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Mobile Device Management invades privacy
With BYOD, companies are more than ever keen on protecting their data. MDM tools, like Google Apps, do more than that; they invade your privacy.
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Patents: how and why to get them
Some of my points are a bit naughty. But I maintain that they're based in fact and fairly widely known. So well-known, in fact, that I'm surprised to have never read it somewhere else.
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George Eliot's reflections on AGI from 1879
Forgotten musings on the economics of AI, an intelligence explosion, and machine consciousness
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Geek Social Fallacies (2003)
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interp
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Conflict vs. Mistake
Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear…
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Internet Access Providers Aren't Bound by DMCA Unmasking Subpoenas–In Re Cox
The DMCA online safe harbor is a notice-and-takedown scheme. Web hosts aren’t liable for copyright-infringing third-party uploads unless and until the copyright owner submits a proper takedown notice to the host, at which point the web host can remain legally...
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AI vending machine was tricked into giving away everything
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
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Haunted by Data
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins).
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Stack Overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
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Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make
Now this is pretty weird: I just got blocked by Twitter for a tweet that I did not make:
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The Lightness of Windows
The Windows 11 announcement was fun and interesting, but there is a reason that Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft’s business.
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Codeberg Divides
Codeberg drew a democratic, but suboptimal line.
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We Can't Let People Work from Home, for Stupid Reasons
Stupid reasons to not allow remote work. Dumb reasons to reject remote work.
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Things You Can’t Say About Assange or WikiLeaks
A complete copy of the 140 things that WikiLeaks said journalists weren’t supposed to say about Julian Assange
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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange
Plus! The Other X; Refinancing China; The Activist Short Death Spiral; Rebundling; Fitness Bands; Diff Jobs
5484
The international student bait-and-switch
Come for the schools, be used as pawns for politics.
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If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?
“Happiness is for stupid people.” That’s a common complaint I hear from smart overachievers. They think only dumb or lazy people can be happy. Entrepreneurs will say, “I don’t want to be happy because I want to be successful.” They worry that if they get too happy they’ll lose their desire and won’t work hard anymore…
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I'm tired of being on the network
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone
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Good people refuse to do bad things
On the responsibility of engineers
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Travel in the USA Requires ID
The TSA says it is possible to fly without ID , but then goes on to state that you still have to prove your identity in some way. If the purpose is to thwart hijackings, then it should be sufficient to simply give anonymous passengers additional screening. But that's not the purpose of ID.
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