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🔗 Wikipedia Has Cancer
Alternative Title: Just because you have some money, that doesn't mean that you have to spend it.
In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Ever-increasing spending can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations.
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- "Wikipedia Has Cancer" | 2024-04-20 | 110 Upvotes 52 Comments
- "Wikipedia Has Cancer" | 2022-10-31 | 42 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Wikipedia has Cancer (Wikipedia costs growth over time)" | 2021-03-17 | 41 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017)" | 2019-12-04 | 528 Upvotes 310 Comments
- "Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth" | 2017-10-08 | 150 Upvotes 121 Comments
- "Wikimedia Foundation spending" | 2017-05-07 | 1054 Upvotes 406 Comments
🔗 Illegal prime
An illegal prime is a prime number that represents information whose possession or distribution is forbidden in some legal jurisdictions. One of the first illegal primes was found in 2001. When interpreted in a particular way, it describes a computer program that bypasses the digital rights management scheme used on DVDs. Distribution of such a program in the United States is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An illegal prime is a kind of illegal number.
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- "Illegal Prime Numbers" | 2021-04-12 | 218 Upvotes 107 Comments
- "Illegal prime" | 2018-04-27 | 267 Upvotes 192 Comments
- "Illegal prime" | 2016-11-22 | 39 Upvotes 26 Comments
- "Illegal prime number" | 2014-07-30 | 59 Upvotes 30 Comments
- "Illegal Prime Numbers" | 2013-10-17 | 178 Upvotes 58 Comments
- "Illegal prime" | 2010-01-11 | 152 Upvotes 76 Comments
🔗 Timeline of the far future
While the future can never be predicted with absolute certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.
All projections of the future of Earth, the Solar System, and the universe must account for the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or a loss of the energy available to do work, must rise over time. Stars will eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out. Close encounters between astronomical objects gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies.
Physicists expect that matter itself will eventually come under the influence of radioactive decay, as even the most stable materials break apart into subatomic particles. Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to flat), and thus will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, and the infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains.
The timelines displayed here cover events from the beginning of the 11th millennium to the furthest reaches of future time. A number of alternative future events are listed to account for questions still unresolved, such as whether humans will become extinct, whether protons decay, and whether the Earth survives when the Sun expands to become a red giant.
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- "Timeline of the Far Future" | 2024-01-14 | 16 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Timeline of the Far Future" | 2020-05-17 | 168 Upvotes 112 Comments
- "Timeline of the far future" | 2018-07-18 | 696 Upvotes 258 Comments
- "Timeline of the far future" | 2012-05-06 | 294 Upvotes 88 Comments
🔗 Day of the Programmer
The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 28th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years). It is officially recognized in Russia.
The number 256 (28) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers. 256 is also the highest power of two that is less than 365, the number of days in a common year.
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- "Happy Programmers' Day to all devs in HN" | 2020-09-12 | 51 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Day of the Programmer" | 2016-09-12 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Happy Programmers' Day" | 2013-09-13 | 245 Upvotes 65 Comments
- "Programmer's Day - 13 September" | 2013-09-09 | 20 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Programmers' Day" | 2011-09-13 | 417 Upvotes 84 Comments
- "Today is Programmer's Day" | 2010-09-13 | 240 Upvotes 38 Comments
🔗 Year 2038 Problem
The Year 2038 problem (also called Y2038 or Y2k38 or Unix Y2K) relates to representing time in many digital systems as the number of seconds passed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 and storing it as a signed 32-bit integer. Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Similar to the Y2K problem, the Year 2038 problem is caused by insufficient capacity used to represent time.
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- "Year 2038 problem of Unix time" | 2024-10-09 | 14 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Year 2038 Problem" | 2022-11-27 | 27 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Year 2038 Problem" | 2022-08-23 | 24 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Year 2038 problem" | 2018-11-12 | 22 Upvotes 9 Comments
- "Year 2038 problem" | 2018-08-25 | 15 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "The Year 2038 Problem" | 2017-07-04 | 12 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Year 2038 problem" | 2014-05-19 | 45 Upvotes 27 Comments
- "Year 2038 problem" | 2013-05-02 | 194 Upvotes 108 Comments
🔗 Room 641A
Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.
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- "Room 641A" | 2024-09-11 | 51 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Room 641A" | 2022-09-26 | 29 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Room 641A" | 2020-05-29 | 333 Upvotes 70 Comments
- "Room 641A" | 2016-09-16 | 207 Upvotes 75 Comments
- "Room 641A" | 2013-06-09 | 248 Upvotes 44 Comments
🔗 Inventors killed by their own inventions
This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.
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- "List of Inventors Killed by Their Own Inventions" | 2021-02-07 | 73 Upvotes 22 Comments
- "Inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2019-06-06 | 273 Upvotes 149 Comments
- "List of inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2019-06-05 | 16 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2016-12-19 | 67 Upvotes 27 Comments
- "List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions" | 2009-09-02 | 109 Upvotes 59 Comments
🔗 List of Lists of Lists
This is a list of other articles that are lists of list articles on the English Wikipedia. In other words, each of the articles linked here is an index to multiple lists on a topic. Some of the linked articles are themselves lists of lists of lists. This article is also a list of lists, and also a list itself.
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- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2021-09-22 | 114 Upvotes 20 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2021-07-14 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2020-10-25 | 16 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists – Wikipedia" | 2020-06-24 | 14 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2019-10-29 | 18 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "Wikipedia: List of lists of lists" | 2018-05-03 | 112 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "List of lists of lists" | 2016-07-28 | 16 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Wikipedia's list of lists of lists" | 2012-02-02 | 195 Upvotes 50 Comments
🔗 The Thing
The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or "bugs") to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945. Because it was passive, needing electromagnetic energy from an outside source to become energized and activate, it is considered a predecessor of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.
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- "The Thing (Listening Device)" | 2021-06-29 | 14 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "The Thing" | 2019-06-11 | 599 Upvotes 104 Comments
- "Great Seal bug" | 2014-08-13 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Thing (listening device)" | 2011-03-03 | 49 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Non-English-based programming languages
Non-English-based programming languages are programming languages that do not use keywords taken from or inspired by English vocabulary.
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- "Non-English-Based Programming Languages" | 2021-10-10 | 10 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "Non-English-based programming languages" | 2019-06-30 | 262 Upvotes 222 Comments
- "Non-English-based programming languages" | 2016-06-23 | 57 Upvotes 18 Comments
- "Non-English-based programming languages" | 2013-09-02 | 77 Upvotes 75 Comments
- "Non-English-based programming languages" | 2009-03-20 | 30 Upvotes 23 Comments