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Map showing the homeland of every character in Homer’s Iliad
This is a map showing where all of the characters originated in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. I know Greece is small by today’s standards, but it was surprising
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,072 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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4chan hacker discusses the manipulation of the Time poll
There’s a scene toward the end of the book Contact by Carl Sagan, where the protagonist Ellie Arroway finds a Message embedded deep in the digits of PI. The Message is perhaps an artifact of …
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Remote work is the best thing to happen to families in decades
Yet commentators and politicians keep missing it
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Regarding the Most Recent Amazon Mechanical Turk Data Contamination
Suggested Citation: Bai, H. (2018) Evidence that A Large Amount of Low Quality Responses on MTurk Can Be Detected with Repeated GPS Coordinates. Retrieved from: https://www.maxhuibai.com/blog/evidence-that-responses-from-repeating-gps-are-random
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It’s Not Too Late for Uber to Avoid Stupid Patent of the Month
“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol As our devoted readers are aware, each month we highlight a...
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Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert's DUNE
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
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Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Dive into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance
It's time to shed light on the technical methods and business practices behind third-party tracking. For journalists, policy makers, and concerned consumers, this paper will demystify the fundamentals of third-party tracking, explain the scope of the problem, and suggest ways for users and legislation to fight back…
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SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society.
About a year ago I built a Chrome extension called SiteChat -- the premise was simple: turn every website into a chatroom. The app was an instant success, and over the following year I watched entire societies emerge and die off inside the bizarre ecosystem that I had created. Genesis and
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Jobs Inside the API
If someone is worse at their job than a drunk person with Google, why do they still have their job?
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EFF Joins Coalition Opposing Dangerous CFAA Bill
EFF and over a dozen other organizations are urging U.S. lawmakers to oppose a dangerous bill proposed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Lindsey Graham that would make the already-flawed Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) worse. The joint letter sent Wednesday explains that the legislation fails to...
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Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
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What if AI is a failed dream?
A collection of thoughts, ideas and unsolicited opinion from Made by Many: articles, reflections, talks and interviews from the people doing the work.
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The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
Discover direct, fluff-free relationship advice, conflict resolution strategies, and insights on modern manhood from Jayson Gaddis. Build a marriage worthy of your ambition.
10460
Antitrust, the App Store, and Apple
Apple’s case before the Supreme Court is about standing; Apple has a strong case. That, though, doesn’t mean the App Store isn’t a monopoly — and that Apple isn’t increasing…
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Age verification is incompatible with the internet
The recent move among U.S. states to add digital “age verification” to websites which serve adult content is a troubling one. Digital age verification systems are rife with privacy concerns, many requiring you to upload your government ID to third-party vendors or even directly to the website in question. Privacy…
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Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex
We help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond.
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EU member states still cannot agree about end-to-end encryption
Stanford Center for Internet and Society2023119 points147 commentscited by 3Society, Policy & Culture details
Recently, Wired reported on documents leaked in May from the Council of the European Union’s ongoing deliberations over the draft Child Sex Abuse Regulation. The proposal is controversial because, as presently written, it would require online service providers to proactively scan their services – including users’…
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Why do commercial spaces sit vacant?
Instead of letting their commercial buildings sit empty, surely it would be better for landlords to lower the rent and got some use out of the building, right? Wrong. Here’s why.
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Anxious Generation – How Safetyism and Social Media Are Damaging the Kids
A review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, exploring how social media and overprotective parenting affect children’s mental health.
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Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions
A new study by Cornell psychologists suggests that science and engineering faculty preferred women two-to-one over identically qualified male candidates for assistant professor positions.
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Responding to Beggars
In the late 70s, a beggar outside Harvard Square station asked for a quarter to take the subway. I gave him one. As I walked down the stairs I noticed that he was not coming along. Instead he was asking another person for a quarter to take the subway. I looked at him for a minute to show him I knew he had lied to me.
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Pop culture has become an oligopoly (2022)
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
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