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Multidimensional analysis of plot arcs in thousands of TV and movie scripts
Note: a somewhat more complete and slightly less colloquial, but eminently more citeable, version of this work is in the Proceedings of the ...
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 515 posts.
482
Schadenfreude
"Magic the Gathering: Online Exchange" has magically gathered all your online bitcoins and exchanged them for ... something or other. More here . For once, do read the comments —it's hysterically funny, in a sad way, to watch the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
483
The Man Who Writes His Dissenting Opinion in All Caps
Terence Faulkner wrote 1/3 of the opposing arguments in this year's SF voter guide. And large chunks of them read like he's yelling at you.
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A call to arms: Helping Internet services accept anonymous users
Looking for a way to help the Internet stay open and free? This topic needs some dedicated...
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The Future Programming Manifesto
It’s time to reformulate the principles guiding my work. [Revised definition of complexity in response to misunderstandings]
487
The Invention of Sliced Bread
Sliced bread: the greatest thing since...sliced bread.
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Microsoft killed my Pappy
I was talking to a young ( The ones I find the most interesting are the ...
490
Engelbart's Violin (2012)
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
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Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
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SSC Gives A Graduation Speech
[Trigger warning for deliberately provoking horror about graduates’ real-world post-college prospects] [Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case] Ladies an…
495
Weak Men Are Superweapons
I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of “I hate peo…
496
The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy
One of the most widely misused terms on the Net is "ad hominem". It is most often introduced into a discussion by certain delicate types, delicate of personality and mind, whenever their opponents resort to a bit of sarcasm . As soon as the suspicion of an insult appears, they summon the angels of ad hominem to smite…
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Clean Coder Blog
Peter was showing the relationship between age and reputation on stack overflow. The correlation is unmistakable. The older the programmer, the better the reputation, by far. He also shows, in the following graph, that the reason for this correlation is that the older programmers answer far more questions than the…
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Participation Inequality: The 90-9-1 Rule for Social Features
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
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Warrant Canary Frequently Asked Questions
What is a warrant canary? A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into...
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All In All, Another Brick In The Motte
One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do…
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FAQ on CEO Resignation
On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla. It has been well documented that Brendan’s past political donations led to boyc
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New Search Strategy for Firefox: Promoting Choice & Innovation
Ten years ago, we built Firefox to keep the Internet in each of our hands — to create choice and put people in control of their lives online. Our focus h
503
Hou tu pranownse Inglish
There have been almost as many proposals for spelling reform as there are rewrites of Esperanto. (Tellingly, there has been precisely one success in each category-- Noah Webster and Ido-- and neither caught on universally.) Most of these proposals spend their energy fixing what isn't broken . For instance, they search…
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Verizon Injecting Perma-Cookies to Track Mobile Customers, Bypassing Privacy Controls
Verizon users might want to start looking for another provider. In an effort to better serve advertisers, Verizon Wireless has been silently modifying its users' web traffic on its network to inject a cookie-like tracker. This tracker, included in an HTTP header called X-UIDH, is sent to every...
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Saint IGNUcius
Stallman is a saint in the Church of Emacs—Saint IGNUcius. I bless your computer, my child! (jpeg 31k, photo by Wouter van Oortmerssen)
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Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women, by major (1970-2012)
Randy Olson charts out the percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women (by major) and makes some startling findings.
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Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio
Randy Olson charts out the IQ of students by their major's gender ratio and reveals a startling trend.
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Hours of Work in U.S. History
In the 1800s, many Americans worked seventy hours or more per week and the length of the workweek became an important political issue. Since then the workweek’s length has decreased considerably. This article presents estimates of the length of the historical workweek in the U.S., describes the history of the…
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FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance
The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read...