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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. 73 posts.
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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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Money creation in the modern economy
Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1
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Government Communication
When legally forced to provide information to government or law enforcement agencies, we'll disclose the transcripts of that communication here.
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Fertility Rate
Explore changing patterns in fertility worldwide, from birth rates to parental ages, twinning rates, reproductive technologies, and more.
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Around 90% of all river-borne plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers
The world has become increasingly alarmed at the amount of plastic in its oceans. But where does all this plastic waste come from?
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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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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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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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The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
The Declaration of Causes made by Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas.
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How much of the world’s land would we need in order to feed the global population with the average diet of a given country?
There are large differences in the land of different diets, mostly depending on how much meat people eat.
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Emails suggest reviews from the Wirecutter are “pay to play” (2014)
Does the Wirecutter offers unbiased real reviews? Not even close. This story is about a little company taking on a fake review site owned by the NY Times.
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A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities2018105 points186 commentscited by 18Society, Policy & Culture details
Data from a variety of sources contribute to a broad picture of strong growth and shared prosperity during the early postwar period, followed by slower growth and greater inequality since the 1970s. Within these broad trends, however, different data tell slightly different parts of the story, and no single data source…
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Guns
Do you have a gun in your home? In general, do you feel that the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now? Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples
40 common false assumptions programmers make about names, debunked with real-world examples from global naming systems and identity practices.
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Blender is testing PeerTube after YouTube blocks their videos worldwide
The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Software — blender.org
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Tildes – A non-profit community site driven by its users' interests
Online communities are in a precarious and unhealthy state right now. We can do better.
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Cancer
Cancers are one of the leading causes of death globally. Are we making progress against them?
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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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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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Privacy not included: Holiday gift list for privacy and security
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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Private Prisons in the United States
Twenty-seven states and the federal government incarcerated 90,873 people in private prisons in 2022, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.
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The American middle class is stable in size, but losing ground financially to upper-income families
While the size of the U.S. middle class remained relatively stable between 2002 and 2016, financial gains for middle-income Americans were modest compared with those of higher-income households.
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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...
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Income Inequality (2016)
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
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Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?
Human trafficking leaves no land untouched. In 2013 the U.S. State Department estimated that there are 27 million victims worldwide trafficked for forced labor or commercial sex exploitation. A 201…