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Life Expectancy
People are living longer across the world, but large differences remain. Explore global data on life expectancy and how it has changed over time.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 60 posts.
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The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
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Russia's “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model
Russia's propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it does not commit to consistency.
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The Trouble with Tor
The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for "the onion router" and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays where each relay only knows the next hop, not the ultimate destination.
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I, Pencil (1958)
Library of Economics and Liberty2016214 points162 commentscited by 28Society, Policy & Culture details
I am a lead pencil–the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write…. [From “I, Pencil”]
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World Population Growth
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
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Child and Infant Mortality
Child mortality remains one of the world’s largest problems and is a painful reminder of work yet to be done. With global data on where, when, and how child deaths occur, we can accelerate efforts to prevent them.
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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. lags behind peer countries in mobility
The notion that anyone in America who is willing and able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can achieve significant upward mobility is deeply embedded in U.S. society. Conventional wisdom holds that class barriers in the United States are the lowest among the world’s advanced economies. Motivating this…
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Trademark Law Does Not Require Companies To Tirelessly Censor the Internet
Over the past few days, EFF and one of our staff technologists, the talented Micah Lee, have had an illuminating back and forth with Canonical Ltd over the use of the Ubuntu mark. While we don’t believe that Canonical has acted with malice or intent to censor, its silly invocation of trademark law...
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Economic Inequality
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
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Request For Research: Basic Income
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
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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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Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race, gender, education
Donald Trump's win followed a campaign that revealed deep divisions that were as wide and in some cases wider than in previous elections.
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Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?
In fiscal year 2024, the federal government spent $6.9 trillion, amounting to 24 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to the June 2024 estimates of the Congressional...
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The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground
After more than four decades of serving as the nation's economic majority, the U.S. middle class is now matched in size by those in the economic tiers above and below it.
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Who Owns the Federal Reserve Banks?
Is the Fed public or private? It's both: the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
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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...
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Famines
In many parts of the world famines have been common in the past. What causes famines? How can famines be averted?
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Why some businesses aren't allowed on Stripe
We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible.
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Human Height
The average height of a population can inform us about the nutrition and living conditions of populations in the past for which we have little other data.
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Against Intellectual Property
Would a libertarian society recognize patents as legitimate? What about copyright? In Against Intellectual Property, Stephan Kinsella, a patent attorney of many
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Hunger and Undernourishment
What are the consequences of undernourishment and how can we make progress against hunger and undernourishment?
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Guns and suicide: A fatal link
In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy behind suicide deaths—about 30,000 a year, one for every 45
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High-income Americans pay most income taxes, but enough to be ‘fair’?
By design, wealthier Americans pay most of the nation’s total individual income taxes.
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Democratic vs. Republican occupations
An interactive chart of the political lean of professions, Democratic versus Republican, built from campaign contribution data.
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A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man
In 1986, at the very first Burn, a crowd of complete strangers gathered around the Man once it was lit it on fire. Nobody had invited them. They didn’t know anything about the 10 Principles, or understand what The Man was...