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We Don't Sell Ads (2012)
Brian and I spent a combined 20 years at Yahoo!, working hard to keep the site working. And yes, working hard to sell ads, because that's what Yahoo! did. It gathered data and it served pages and it sold ads.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,068 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Australian Government Scrambles to Authorize Mass Surveillance
This week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used recent terrorist threats as the backdrop of a dire warning to Australians that “for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift. There may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more...
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Who Is Being Monitored?
Politicians regularly claim that they need to ban encryption to protect the children. But who is actually being monitored?
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Some Day, You’ll Have a Telephone with a Screen and Be Able To Dial a Book
Question for Quote Investigator: The host of a video on YouTube mentioned a remarkably prescient quotation from a New York book dealer in the 1960s who predicted that telephones would have screens, and people would read books on those screens selected from a large electronic library. Would you please explore this…
6246
Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy
Patents give their owners the power to stop people (and companies) from doing whatever the patent claims as an “invention” for twenty years. But that power doesn’t come for free: it’s a trade. In exchange for the right to sue others to stop using the invention, patent applicants have to disclose...
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160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.
I rarely re-blog, but this one deserves being spread far and wide. Timeline of the Destruction of 100 Year Old Franklin County, NC Records Please read the whole post included above – but the …
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The Rocky Horror Coffin Clock
It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll…
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Guinea worm disease is close to being eradicated (2022)
In the late 1980s, there were near a million new cases of guinea worm disease recorded worldwide. In 2021, there were only 15. How was this achieved?
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FBI doesnt want you to know it uses NSLs to correlate identities you use online
Back in March, I parsed the declaration Nicholas Merrill submitted in his bid to reveal the contents of what he was asked to turn over via an NSL back in 2004. As a reminder, here’s what FBI permitted Merrill to reveal at the beginning of this suit. And here’s Merrill’s description of what kind of […]
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Don’t Shoot Messenger
Update (September 28, 2018): Reuters reports that the court has denied the government's request to force Facebook to assist with the wiretap.Late last week, Reuters reported that Facebook is being asked to “break the encryption” in its Messenger application to assist the Justice Department in...
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Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech
Within five days of ChatGPT’s release in 2022, the artificial intelligence chatbot gained more than a million users. Today, more than half of all adults
6257
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts (2020)
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts said Richard Feynman. Feynman had a Nobel prize in physics. He was a remarquable educator: his lecture notes are still popular. He foresaw nanotechnology and quantum computing. He is credited with identifying the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There is…
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Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
Colin Campbell explains how Redwood drains every drop of capacity from used batteries before they are recycled.
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All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second
I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth ...
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Save the USPS
There are three types of infrastructure. One is visible: roads, dams and bridges. The second is invisible: broadband internet provisions and the entirety of our cellular infrastructure. Both are st…
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YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
In 2018, Pew Research Center reported [https://www.pewglobal.org/2019/03/04/u-s-german-relations-methodology-spring-2018-global-attitudes-survey/] that 57% of Americans believe that children in America today will be worse off financially than their parents. Since 2013, this number has been as high as 65% — even though…
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RMS lifestyle
I do not have a favorite food, a favorite book, a favorite song, a favorite joke, a favorite flower, or a favorite butterfly. My tastes don't work that way.
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De-googling, so far
Over the past few years, I have tried to gradually reduce or eliminate my use of Google products and services. It has been difficult to ditch Google’s products in some categories, and in some others, it has been nigh impossible. Here, I list the services I have tried to find alternatives for, discuss the ease (or lack…
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Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Very weird, isn't it?
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An Economy of Overfed Middlemen
A venture capitalist called Equal Ventures just says it straight-up, we seek to invest in monopolization.
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Smartphones Are Toys First, Tools Second
If you time-traveled to the 1960s, or even the 1980s, and tried to describe smartphones to the people you met, they wouldn’t believe you.
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A connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity
Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximize employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction
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A year of vibes
A personal recap of 2025 and a year of a new style of engineering.