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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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If you'd built a "tool" that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The…
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The most successful developers share more than they take
After interviewing several developers, a pattern started to become clear: great developers share a lot. This takes different forms for different people, but is very often a blog. But for many top developers, their sharing mindset came before their success, and was the direct cause of it, not the result of it.
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How I Dealt with Student Plagiarism
Panos Ipeirotis , a colleague at the NYU Stern School of Business , received considerable media attention when, in a blog post he subsequently removed , he discussed how his aggressive use of plagiarism detection software on student assignments poisoned the classroom atmosphere and tanked his teaching evaluations. As…
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Even when you do succeed, sometimes it pays to try again
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
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U.S. Government Threatens Free Speech With Calls for Twitter Censorship
“[T]he ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas....That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissent in Abrams v. United States, 1919EFF has witnessed a growing number of calls in recent weeks for Twitter to ban certain...
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Federating Do-It-Yourself ISPs from around the world
Last December, the FDN Federation attended the 30th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg.
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Neil Armstrong, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman
Neal Stephenson and I were not standing in order to make it quite clear who Neil #1 was and would always be. I spent a couple of days ...
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Terms and Conditions, the Graphic Novel
When artist Robert Sikoryak put the iTunes Terms and Conditions into graphic novel format, he tapped a familiar problem. Most of us don’t read the terms
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Fewer Than 1000 Brits Googled “What Is the EU?” After Referendum
I’ve never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating. The media, pundits, and academics have desperately tried to paint the Brexit voters as ignorant, backwoods troglodytes who only voted to leave the EU because they don’t like brown people.
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"All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MIT Spam Conference talk
As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case ...
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The curious death of Oppenheimer’s mistress (2015)
Who killed J. Robert Oppenheimer's Communist lover?
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Quad9 Files Official Objection Opposing Sony Music’s German Court Ruling
A public and free DNS service for a better security and privacy
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A Breakthrough Cure for Ebola
Ebola is one of the nastiest, most frightening viruses known to man. Its victims suffer fevers, muscle weakness, and other symptoms that pr...
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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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Supporters of Mexico’s Soda Tax Targeted with NSO Exploit Links (2017)
An investigation revealing that Mexican soda tax supporters were targeted with NSO Group's government-exclusive spyware and exploit framework.
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Pegasus vs. Predator
Two Egyptians—exiled politician Ayman Nour and the host of a popular news program (who wishes to remain anonymous)—were hacked with Predator spyware, built and sold by the previously little-known mercenary spyware developer Cytrox. The phone of Ayman Nour was simultaneously infected with both Cytrox’s Predator and NSO…
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New Car: An Accessible Minivan
We have a new vehicle, a Honda Odyssey Elite customised for my wheelchair, and for me to drive with hand controls.
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Mental health websites don't have to sell user data but most still do
The changes discussed in this article are based on a second analysis performed in late November, 3 months after the original study Your Mental Health is for Sale and following the exact same methodology.
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The European Union's remarkable growth performance relative to the United States
The EU has outperformed the US on per-capita output growth; in terms of output per hour worked, some EU countries are as productive as the US
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What makes housing so expensive?
Buying a home is by far the largest purchase most of us will make, and paying the rent or mortgage will be our largest monthly expense.
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AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society
I’ve been thinking about why AI feels like such a destabilizing force for society, and it isn’t just the threat of even greater…
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