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Economic Inequality
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,107 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
302
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?
303
Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
304
What the data says about immigrants in the U.S.
As of June 2025, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s.
305
Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
306
Population Growth
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
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The Perils of JavaSchools
Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…
308
Which form of transport has the smallest carbon footprint?
How can individuals reduce their emissions from transport?
309
Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women, by major (1970-2012)
Randy Olson charts out the percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women (by major) and makes some startling findings.
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Hours of Work in U.S. History
In the 1800s, many Americans worked seventy hours or more per week and the length of the workweek became an important political issue. Since then the workweek’s length has decreased considerably. This article presents estimates of the length of the historical workweek in the U.S., describes the history of the…
312
Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage
In Pew Research Center polling in 2001, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 57% to 35%. Since then, support for same-sex marriage has steadily grown.
313
Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Pay: Why It Matters and Why It’s Real
The data series and methods we use to construct our graph of the growing gap between productivity and typical worker pay best capture how income generated in an average hour of work in the U.S. economy has not trickled down to raise hourly pay for typical workers.
314
Galactic-Scale Energy
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
315
Net Neutrality Violations: A History of Abuse
Here's what happens when cable and phone companies are left to their own devices.
316
Verizon doesn't know Dollars from Cents
Click here for Audio (27 minutes - PutFile is reporting the time wrong) Here's the background: I have a Verizon unlimited data plan in the ...
317
Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison20251,750 points1,049 commentscited by 16Society, Policy & Culture details
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
318
A Protocol for Dying
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
319
Software Disenchantment (2018)
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
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SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
SQLite is a Recommended Storage Format for datasets according to the US Library of Congress . Further information:
322
Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework . Some of their results included (lower is better):
323
Resignation Letter
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
324
An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox
On Wednesday we shared that we’re introducing a new terms of use (TOU) and privacy notice for Firefox. Since then, we’ve been listening to some of our
325
Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
326
The Advertising Bubble
A few days ago VentureBeat published an article called The 7 martech buying trends shaping sales & marketing strategies in 2016 , a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity.
327
Gallup: 81% of Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence
It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions.
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How to Destroy the Earth (2006)
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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