Viewing profile — freakonom

You have it backwards. The state and its avatars recognize that they can and must have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communicati…

The point isn't that working at a startup is heroic. The point is that if you don't believe in your core that the startup's mission is worth spending the last year of your life on,…

An answer that usually works: Absolutely, because there have been no large scale terrorist attacks.

> The internet poses one of the greatest threats to our existence This is true, where "our" refers to domestic spy agencies and the governments that consume their output. Hence the…

You know what would be super clever? Discovering a case where wget shells out to bash while setting some env vars based on received headers. And then anonymously posting a supposed…

You should be paranoid about both because they're the same thing. One tech company's backdoor is another NSA's vulnerability to exploit (and silence with an NSL).

The ecosystem of linux software that shells out to bash is ridiculous, and coercing an env var is a very light requirement. Virtually any software that takes input from the interne…

s/Secret Service Special Agents/American hijackers/ s/U.S. government employees/Americans/ We therefore conclude that "Some Americans are American hijackers." The logic's airtight;…

Companies will gradually start selling services piecemeal at what will be promoted as a "discount", where you buy a tiered package of sites. "Obviously, you only need Facebook, Goo…

You could actually argue that handling of these petitions is very transparent: petition text goes in, petition text comes out, and there's a null transform in the middle.

Between the lines: Google has calculated that ExpectedLockinValue(given(ventureFunded)) + SillyPRBoost.value > ExpectedUsage($100k/yr) Or, in other words, Google believes for the v…

npm as your package manager: npm install -g node as your shell: node An actual minimalist kernel booting to node might be interesting. But this isn't that. This just looks like pla…

This is a Free Speech Cage [1] with suits. Straight from the history books, it's one of the last phases of the plan that goes like this: 1) leverage an extraordinary event to scare…

I wonder who's manning this submarine [1]. [1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> constantly employed as an argument-ending sledgehammer Or, it could be being employed as a reminder that in our systemically biased reality many people aren't judged on their mer…

The courts would have to decide. Reasonable IANAL answer: the person who owns the copyright to (the strings in) the code.

Without TLS, absolutely anyone along the link (not just curl.io) can inject some BS into your command line if you choose to copy-paste. If you don't trust curl.io, fine. But withou…