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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. 37 posts.
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Wage suppression in 10 charts
Wages for typical workers lag far behind productivity growth. It hasn't always been this way and does not have to be this way. These 10 charts outline the historical context of workers’ wage trajectories, and what can be done to fix the gaping disparities.
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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
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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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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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Average Household Electricity Consumption - 2026
We used data from EIA to get up-to-date average household electricity consumption. We compiled statistics to compare to other countries.
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Chapter 1: Beliefs About Sharia
According to the survey findings, most Muslims believe sharia is the revealed word of God rather than a body of law developed by men based on the word of God.…
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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40% of Millennials OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities
That's compared with 27% of Gen Xers and 24% of Boomers who say the same.
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Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians
The difficulties associated with proving and addressing gender discrimination in hiring processes have presented policymakers with a major challenge over the past few decades. In an attempt to overcome gender-biased hiring, a vast majority of symphony orchestras revised their hiring practices from the 1950s. Many…
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Update on Digital Rights Management and Firefox
A year ago, we announced the start of efforts to implement support for a component in Firefox that would allow content wrapped in Digital Rights Management
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What Twitter Can Be
Disclaimers: 1) This is a very long read. Thinking about a company and using its product obsessively for nine years straight will do that to you. 2) My funds and I own a lot of Twitter stock. 3) I do not … Continue reading →
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Inside The Fine Art Factories of China
When Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo toiled for four years on his master work. Renoir spent six months painting Luncheon of the Boating Party—the painting featured in the film Amélie. Even Guernica, which Pablo Picasso painted quickly to publicize the…
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Django Awarded MOSS Grant from Mozilla
Posted by Andrew Godwin on Dec. 11, 2015
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Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches—a practice EFF uncovered while researching its “Spying on...
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The Loading Screen Game Patent Finally Expires
In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games. What’s transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time. Namco’s patent covers “auxiliary games” that a player...
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How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)
Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Drawing on data from the US, Germany and the UK, Alexandre Afonso looks at how…
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Microsoft’s new small print – how your personal data is abused
Microsoft has renewed its Privacy Policy and Service Agreement. The new services agreement goes into effect on 1 August 2015, only a couple of days after the launch of the Windows 10 operating system on 29 July. The new “privacy dashboard” is presented to give the users a possibility to control their data related to…
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Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions
A new study by Cornell psychologists suggests that science and engineering faculty preferred women two-to-one over identically qualified male candidates for assistant professor positions.
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You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist
It got a lot of attention this morning when I tweeted , “You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist.” It’s been quickly retweeted dozens of times, indicating that the idea is interesting to many people. So let’s discuss it in more than 140 characters.
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Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go from Here
The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by...
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The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared
Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions...
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VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GNU General Public…
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Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet
Facebook's Internet.org project, which offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global digital divide should be...