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Politics and the English Language (1946)
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 56 posts.
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Kagi Small Web
As a part of our ongoing pursuit to humanize the web, we are pleased to announce the launch of the Kagi Small Web initiative. What is Kagi Small Web? To begin with, while there is no...
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No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
The risks and harms associated with drinking alcohol have been systematically evaluated over the years and are well documented. The World Health Organization has now published a statement in The Lancet Public Health: when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.
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Per capita CO₂ emissions Over Time
An interactive visualization from Our World in Data.
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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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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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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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Almost all of the world’s mammal biomass is humans and livestock
Humans and livestock make up 95% of the world’s mammal biomass; wild mammals are just 5%.
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Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians
Vehicles with especially tall front ends are most dangerous to pedestrians, but a blunt profile makes medium-height vehicles deadly too.
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Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?
The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty, but it is still the reality for almost one in ten people worldwide.
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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
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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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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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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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Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed by Mozilla
Mozilla’s latest edition of *Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information.
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Statement on AI Risk
A statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of experts: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
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Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990)
A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
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Statement on 'Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses' review
June 2024 update: Following engagement with the authors, the decision has been made that changes to the plain language summary and abstract would not impact the scientific integrity of the content and so Cochrane is no longer seeking updates to the plain language summary and abstract of this version of the review…
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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
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Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features
Apple today previewed software features for cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility accessibility, along with innovative tools for individuals who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak.
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New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
We’re launching a classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text.
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Goodbye, section 2.8 and hello to Cloudflare’s new terms of service
We’re excited to announce new updates that will modernize our terms of service and hopefully cut down on customer confusion and frustration.
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How many people have ever lived on Earth?
The global population milestone of 8 billion represents nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth.
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Global Perspective on U.S. Health Care
This cross-national comparison of health care systems assesses U.S. health spending, outcomes, status, and service use relative to 12 other high-income countries.
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“Pay or Okay” on tech news site heise.de illegal, decides German DPA
The Data Protection Authority of Lower Saxony (LfD) decided that the “Pay or Okay” solution used by heise.de was unlawful
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How is money created?
Most of the money in the economy is created by banks when they provide loans.
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High U.S. Health Care Spending
Administrative costs, prescription drugs, and physician and nurse wages may contribute to excess health spending in the U.S., compared with peer nations.
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French govt. says users of uBlock Origin, Signal etc. are potential terrorists
This article was written on the basis of information related to the so-called "8 December" case (see the footnotes for a global overview of the case, we focus on the "numerical part" of it in this article<fn>For a summary of the 8 December affair see in particular the testimonies available in thi
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Urgent: Sign the petition now
Nearly 40,000 of all depositors at Silicon Valley Bank were small businesses. If swift action isn’t taken, over 100,000 people could soon lose their jobs.