271
Who makes minimum wage?
Perhaps surprisingly, not very many people earn minimum wage, and they make up a smaller share of the workforce than they used to.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 894 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
272
Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
The US government has issued an export control directive suspending all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by foreign nationals inside or outside the US.
273
Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life
Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
274
Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
275
Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles,' published March 28, 2022. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
276
Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
277
NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender
Ahmed Mansoor was targeted by NSO Group, an Israel-based “cyber war” company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product.
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Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data
In the “first half of 2016” (the most specific we’re permitted to be), we received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia. The subpoena required us to provide information about two Signal users for a federal grand jury investigation. We’ve designed the Signal service to minimize the dat...
280
Two HN Announcements
The HN community feels like it owns HN, and we like it that way. HN has become an important institution in the tech community, and though it was initially developed for YC founders it’s clearly evolved into much more than that. We’ve always felt that the best way for HN to benefit YC is simply for it to maximally…
281
Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime
Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF’s advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle’s website in a manner it didn’t like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website’s terms of use is not a...
282
Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features
Apple today previewed software features for cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility accessibility, along with innovative tools for individuals who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak.
283
New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
We’re launching a classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text.
284
Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
Cloudflare launched nearly twelve years ago. Over that time, our set of services has become much more complicated. With that complexity we have developed policies around how we handle abuse of different features Cloudflare provides
285
Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
Get Satisfaction, a third-party customer service app/community, allows customers to offer feedback, make suggestions, get their questions answered, and generally get help with a product or service. A good idea Building support/community infrastructure is a pain point for a lot of companies. The…
286
China's Great Cannon
This post describes our analysis of an attack tool that we identify as separate from, but co-located with, the Great Firewall of China.
287
‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang
Australian Strategic Policy Institute2020255 points106 commentscited by 11Society, Policy & Culture details
‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang. What’s the problem? The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority1 citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs…
288
Goodbye, section 2.8 and hello to Cloudflare’s new terms of service
We’re excited to announce new updates that will modernize our terms of service and hopefully cut down on customer confusion and frustration.
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Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?
Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. What factors may explain this?
291
How death rates from Covid-19 differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated
To understand how the pandemic is evolving, it’s crucial to know how death rates from COVID-19 are affected by vaccination status.
292
How many people have ever lived on Earth?
The global population milestone of 8 billion represents nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth.
293
Income Inequality (2016)
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
294
Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier (2017)
Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. What factors may explain this?
295
The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians (1997)
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
296
Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers
We examined the injustices of prison labor nationwide — and lay the foundation for a more equitable path forward.
297
Famines
In many parts of the world famines have been common in the past. What causes famines? How can famines be averted?
298
Are Recipes and Cookbooks Protected by Copyright
Are Recipes and Cookbooks Protected by Copyright? Our experts at Copyright Alliance answer this frequently asked question in this week's blog post.
299
U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries
American students continue to rank around the middle of the pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations, in international assessments of math, science and reading.
300
Urbanization
Around 80% of the world’s population lives in cities, towns, and suburbs rather than rural settlements. How has this changed, and what does urbanization look like across the world today?