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Plastic Pollution
How much plastic ends up in the ocean? Where does it come from?
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
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Per capita CO₂ emissions Over Time
An interactive visualization from Our World in Data.
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Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?
False positives cause many promising detection technologies to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack true positives are targets successfully attacked, while false positives are those that are attacked but yield nothing. This allows us to view the attacker’s…
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U.S. could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat, Cornell ecologist advises animal scientists
From one ecologist's perspective, the American system of farming grain-fed livestock consumes resources far out of proportion to the yield, accelerates soil erosion, affects world food supply and will be changing in the future.
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For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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Abortion
With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life? Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?
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Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
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Remembering the Case that Established Code as Speech
One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a...
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COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the world. Explore global data and research to understand its impact, spread, and global response.
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Working Hours
How much time do people across the world spend working? How have working hours changed over time, and what do these changes matter for people’s lives? Explore data and research on working hours.
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A new approach to China
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
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Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
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It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy
Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer…
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Novel Coronavirus situation reports
The Weekly Epidemiological Update provides an overview of the global, regional and country-level COVID-19 cases and deaths, highlighting key data and trends; as well as other pertinent epidemiological information concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.
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What Percentage of Americans Own Stock?
Since 2023, an average of 62% of Americans report owning stock, a rebound after more than a decade of lower readings.
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Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin Protects Scraping of Public Data
In a long-awaited decision in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that automated scraping of publicly accessible data likely does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This is an important clarification of the CFAA’s scope, which should provide...
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Oregon Engineer Wins Traffic-Light Timing Lawsuit
Arlington, Va.—On December 28, 2018, Magistrate Judge Stacie F. Beckerman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon entered a judgment largely ruling […]
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Electricity Mix
Explore data on where our electricity comes from and how this is changing.
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By 2029 no computer or “machine intelligence” will have passed the Turing Test
will go to The Electronic Frontier Foundation if Kapor wins, or The Kurzweil Foundation if Kurzweil wins.
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Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020
Report showing the number of people who are locked up in the United States and why
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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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Google CEO Eric Schmidt Dismisses the Importance of Privacy
Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information with...
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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
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Wage Theft is a Bigger Problem Than Other Forms of Theft (2014)
Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies. Employers steal billions of dollars from their employees…
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How little musicians earn online
Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy...
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USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard Chan School’s Atul Gawande.
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Fact Sheet | Fossil Fuel Subsidies: A Closer Look at Tax Breaks and Societal Costs (2019) | White Papers
See our latest white papers on fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel externalities .
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Mortality Risk of COVID-19
Explore data on the mortality risk of COVID-19 across the world.