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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. 2,107 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Where does the plastic in oceans come from?
Which countries and rivers emit the most plastic to the ocean? What does this mean for solutions to tackle plastic pollution?
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Who Writes Wikipedia?
Part 1: Wikimedia at the Crossroads Part 2: Who Writes Wikipedia? Part 3: Who Runs Wikipedia? Part 4: Making More Wikipedians Part 5: Making More Wikipedias Part 6: Code, and Other Laws
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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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Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
Researchers found that surgical masks impede the spread of COVID-19 and that just a few, low-cost interventions increase mask-wearing compliance.
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Haunted by Data
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins).
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Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)
Rich countries consume much higher quantities via higher intensity/tech. It's NOT high and rising: wages, profits, administration, encounters, etc. Income well explains American behavior here too.
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Joint Statement on the GNU Project
Blog posts about GNU Guix.
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Microsoft killed my Pappy
I was talking to a young ( The ones I find the most interesting are the ...
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Europe: The end of the privacy of digital correspondence
The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content - generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of full
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Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and no…
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Trust: Our World in Data
Trust is essential for effective cooperation. How does trust vary between different societies and locations and what matters for levels of trust?
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Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told yo…
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Energy Mix
Explore global data on where our energy comes from, and how this is changing.
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Rates of Motor Vehicle Crashes, Injuries and Deaths in Relation to Driver Age, United States, 2014-2015
This Research Brief presents updated data on crash risk using data on crashes from the US DOT in conjunction with data on driving mileage from the AAA Foundation's American Driving Survey.
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Data review: ethnographic and archaeological evidence on violent deaths
What quantitative data is there about violent deaths in non-state societies?
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Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022cited by 16History & Retro Computing details
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
351
Plato's Argument Against Writing
The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions are going to be.
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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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Ideology
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
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Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever
So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they’ve ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and…
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Two-Thirds of Americans Think Government Should Do More on Climate
There is bipartisan support for several proposals to reduce the effects of climate change, especially for large scale tree-plantings to help absorb carbon emissions and offering tax credits to businesses that capture carbon emissions.
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Metacrap
Version 1.1, May 18 2001. Changed section orders for better organization. (Thanks, Raffi). Clarified "metrics" in 2.6 (Thanks, Andy).
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The Queen's Duck
Brian Wigginton
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Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy
[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years …
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Sizing Up Twitter Users
Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated and have higher incomes than U.S. adults overall.
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Terminating Service for 8Chan
The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies. In the case of the El Paso shooting, the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan.