Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

If you want a secret tip to exploring a new world, download Papers (http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/), put all the interesting publications you find in one Dropbox folder, and import them. The annotation and note features - as well as the back-up option - makes this a really enjoyable way to publications.

It really is something to read papers that define the way we think, and it's a nice alternative to short blog posts and (pop) articles versus (pop) books.

Here are some papers to get you started:

\* 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=0998565

\* Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006

\* A technique for isolating differences between files: http://ejohn.org/projects/javascript-diff-algorithm/

\* A Future-Adaptable Password Scheme: http://static.usenix.org/events/usenix99/provos.html

Maybe this is cheating, maybe it isn't, but I definitely recommend it.

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If you want to get political, some left-of-centre-leaning writers you can't go wrong with:

1. Matt Taibbi on Wall Street, Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog)

2. Frank Rich in American politics, now at New York Magazine (https://twitter.com/frankrichny)

3. Glenn Greenwald on civil liberties and foreign policy, in moderation (http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/)

4. Juan Cole on the Middle East, in moderation (http://www.juancole.com/)

5. Lawyers, Guns, and Money (http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/)

6. The New Yorker's long-form articles. (I find their blog posts to be really poor, by any standards.) Also, ditch the Malcolm Gladwell articles.

Slightly OT, but the "Nothing to Hide"/Privacy article is yet another example of "how not to write an abstract":

>In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

In other words, "there's a common argument out there, and I'm gonna refute it". Does that help me decide whether to read the paper? No, because it gives no hint about specific part of the argument it's going to refute, or what "underpinning" it's going to claim is "faulty".

This kind of crap is extremely prevalent in abstracts, and in people's ability to summarize and justify recommendations.

+1 for Juan Cole, he was my professor in undergrad, and it was one of the most insightful college classes I've ever had.

Is that a typo on their page ? It says "Papers Livfe Share your collection with colleagues and peers, discover new papers, collaborate." in the bottom right call out boxes.

Bummer, no Linux support for papers.

Try Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/

Nice, thanks!

What's wrong with Malcolm Gladwell?

Personally, I don't mind his style. It's entertaining, but he has a tendency to draw some ridiculous conclusions by drawing a few lines between here and there. I prefer his New Yorker articles over his books, though, which tend to merely repeat his thesis over and over.

He tends to be more of a stream of consciousness writer than an ideas man.

My recollection of reading him is he doesn't build an argument from premise to conclusion, but implies an argument by stringing together perhaps unrelated anecdotes and studies.

Why would this be cheating? (Maybe I am misunderstanding something?)

The papers aren't technically websites, but publications. I felt it would slightly out of the purview of the question, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Left-of-centre implies someone moderate like Obama. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are much more to the left than "left-of-centre"

Outside of the US frame of reference, Obama is very much a conservative, and Democrat policies would happily work in right-wing parties. Obama is definitely not a moderate when viewed in a global sense.

Do you really imagine that someone trying to set up mandatory EU-wide health insurance in the EU would be considered "conservative" in Europe? Notwithstanding that "conservative" means very different things, depending on which part of Europe you are in.

The idea that there is an objective left-right scale, and that the US is skewed far right compared to the rest of the world is a myth.

Personally, I tend to the definitions: left - pretends to be caring; right - pretends to be competent.

Nice reframing. Yes, if said person was taking away the socialised healthcare that's already in place across much of Europe and replacing it with the much more business-friendly version promoted by the Democrats, they absolutely, positively would be seen as being what we term 'conservative' (or right wing anologue - in Russia, they are reversed, apparently).

I doubt that the Democratic political culture would be considered conservative anywhere in Western Europe: they do the normal leftist thing of trying to build power through coalitions of victim groups, trying to raise taxes on the rich, and so forth.

I can assure you that in the UK, replacing the NHS with an EU-wide health care system would not be seen as conservative, whether you see it as "pro business" or not.

What policies of the Democratic party do you think would be considered conservative?

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