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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
182
The Inner Ring (1944)
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
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SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
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Five Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
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Is soy a key driver of deforestation?
The world loses 5 million hectares of forest each year. What activities are driving this?
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Ethereum Energy Consumption
The basic information you need to understand Ethereum's energy consumption.
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Data Centers and Water Consumption | Article
See all of our articles on the impacts of data centers , including their energy needs, water usage, noise pollution, and contribution to higher energy bills: The Environmental Impacts of Data Centers (Article Series)
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Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models
Our measurements of the time horizons for public frontier language models.
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Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?
Our impact on climate change is not just about emissions that occur today. How much we emitted in the past also matters.
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Coronavirus disease (COVID-19)
WHO is continuously monitoring and responding to this pandemic. This questions and answers page will be updated as more is known about COVID-19, how it spreads and how it is affecting people worldwide. For more information, regularly check the WHO coronavirus pages. https://www.who.int/covid-19
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Electoral Turnovers
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.
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Warrant Canary Frequently Asked Questions
What is a warrant canary? A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into...
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Qwest CEO: NSA Punished Qwest for Refusing to Participate in Illegal Surveillance--Pre-9/11!
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts (log-in required) worth hundreds of...
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Worldwide, Median Household Income About $10,000
New Gallup global income data estimate the median household income across 131 countries at $9,733, and median per-capita income at $2,920. Incomes in the 10 wealthiest countries are more than 50 times those in the 10 poorest.
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The facts about a recent counterfeiting case brought by the U.S. government
In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012, and we have received a number of questions about this case and our role in it. Although the case was not one that we brought, the questions raised recently have caused us...
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What Percentage of Americans Own Guns?
Read Gallup's short answer to this common question about gun ownership, including what percentages of major demographic subgroups own guns.
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Sector by sector: where do global greenhouse gas emissions come from?
Globally, we emit around 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases yearly. Where do these emissions come from? We take a look, sector-by-sector.
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New Search Strategy for Firefox: Promoting Choice & Innovation
Ten years ago, we built Firefox to keep the Internet in each of our hands — to create choice and put people in control of their lives online. Our focus h
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Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly
The United States trails far behind other high-income countries on measures of health care affordability, administrative efficiency, equity, and outcomes.
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What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.
The number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the third consecutive year in 2024 but remained among the highest annual totals on record.
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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.
203
It’s Time to Build
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one…
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NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild
Citizen Lab found an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability being used to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware while checking the device of an individual employed by a Washington DC-based civil society organization with international offices. We refer to the exploit chain as BLASTPASS. The exploit chain…
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Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet
Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled "Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL" because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.
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Apple can comply with the FBI court order
Earlier today, a federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request for technical assistance in the recovery of the San Bernadino gunmen’s iPhone 5C. Since then, many have argued whether these requests from the FBI are technically feasible given the support for strong encryption on iOS devices. Based on my…
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The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)
will go to Bletchly Park Trust if Keith wins, or The Internet Archive if Haughey wins.
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The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma…
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Happiness and Life Satisfaction (2017)
Self-reported life satisfaction differs widely between people and between countries. What explains these differences?