Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 86 posts.
Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the…
On goal drift and lower reliability. Or, why can't LLMs play Conway's Game Of Life?
Committee to Protect Journalists2024449 points807 commentscited by 3Society, Policy & Culture details
Editor’s note: In keeping with CPJ’s methodology, data will be updated as new information becomes available. See CPJ’s database for the most current data on killed journalists. As of September 24, 2026, CPJ’s preliminary investigations show that at least 247 journalists and media workers are among the more than tens…
After Snowden’s whistleblowing in 2013, large parts of the internet became encrypted, enabling private and secure communication. Not everyone has welcomed this change. Most notably, the FBI and other U.S. government agencies have fought what is often called the “crypto wars”, the war on encryption. In recent years…
Is Product Hunt worth it? Dive into the data to find out.
An MIT study on “legalese” suggests this convoluted language acts to convey a sense of authority in legal documents. The researchers also found that even non-lawyers use legalese when asked to write laws.
Update: This post has been updated to clarify the scope of the compelled assistance provisions and the broad nature of criminalization and electronic evidence gathering. The final version of the draft convention can still be used to expand the reach of repression under the pretext of combating...
On 17 January 2024, the Government of the Czech Republic approved the material "Restarting the implementation of DNSSEC and IPv6 technologies in the state administration". On the basis of this decision, the Czech state administration will stop providing its services over IPv4 on 6 June 2032. Thus, the Czech Republic…
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
Early websites. In the beginning, website HTML was crafted by hand. Your average personal — or corporate — website might consist of hand-edited HTML subsequently uploaded, probably via FTP, to a web server which knew only how to serve static files.
Google search is in the news. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google search is a monopoly and is behaving in a manner that suppresses search competition with their distribution agreements. The debate on this has started,...
We talk a bit about the AI crawler abuse we are seeing at Read the Docs, and warn that this behavior is not sustainable.
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
If you want to build principled software, avoid becoming VCware. Stay user-supported. It is now possible for tiny teams to build principled software that mil...
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual
noyb filed a complaint against Mozilla for quietly enabling a supposed “privacy feature” (called Privacy Preserving Attribution) in its Firefox browser which tracks user behaviour on websites.
I think turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea. However, recent news coverage has been framing the weaponization of pagers and radios in the Middle East as something we do not need to concern ourselves with because “we” are safe.
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.
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro -monopoly – they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the…
Famous Birthdays has been described as a “ Wikipedia for Gen-Z ”. It’s an insight into popularity across the internet of influencers, not just from traditional stage and screen but also social media channels such as TikTok and Instagram.
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
