Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,107 posts.
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone , ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
The basic information you need to understand Ethereum's energy consumption.
What3Words is a widely promoted system that is used for sharing a location using just three words. For example, ///wedge.drill.mess is located in Hyde Park.The globe is divided into 3m squares, eac…
See all of our articles on the impacts of data centers , including their energy needs, water usage, noise pollution, and contribution to higher energy bills: The Environmental Impacts of Data Centers (Article Series)
Our measurements of the time horizons for public frontier language models.
Our impact on climate change is not just about emissions that occur today. How much we emitted in the past also matters.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
WHO is continuously monitoring and responding to this pandemic. This questions and answers page will be updated as more is known about COVID-19, how it spreads and how it is affecting people worldwide. For more information, regularly check the WHO coronavirus pages. https://www.who.int/covid-19
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
What is a warrant canary? A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into...
Ashley's Apple Saga
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts (log-in required) worth hundreds of...
New Gallup global income data estimate the median household income across 131 countries at $9,733, and median per-capita income at $2,920. Incomes in the 10 wealthiest countries are more than 50 times those in the 10 poorest.
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...
Read Gallup's short answer to this common question about gun ownership, including what percentages of major demographic subgroups own guns.
Globally, we emit around 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases yearly. Where do these emissions come from? We take a look, sector-by-sector.
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the c…
Ten years ago, we built Firefox to keep the Internet in each of our hands — to create choice and put people in control of their lives online. Our focus h
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my sta…
The United States trails far behind other high-income countries on measures of health care affordability, administrative efficiency, equity, and outcomes.
In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol...
[I hope that it’s obvious from what follows that this is a statement of personal opinion, not an official Mozilla document.]
[Content warning: some ideas that might make you feel anxious about your political beliefs. Epistemic status: very speculative and not necessarily endorsed. This post is less something I will defen…
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.
