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GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa
Money always helps, but for the poorest, one large lump sum can last a long time. A long-term universal basic income also looks promising.
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
992
Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
Our updated modeling strategy now estimates total COVID-19 mortality, including unreported deaths due to COVID-19.
993
Google, the Stupidity Amplifier (2016)
Google, the Stupidity Amplifier by Greg Egan
994
Does Georgism work? Is land a big deal?
A guest post on Georgism by Lars Doucet
995
Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)
Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no…
996
When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…
997
How Breakfast Became a Thing
Do you think breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Then you fell for an ad campaign designed in 1944 to sell more cereal.
998
The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it
Since around 2009, methamphetamines have been made with phenylacetone (P2P). Is there a chemical different causing schizophrenia?
999
How Police Officers Seize Cash from Innocent Americans
Under civil forfeiture laws, police officers can take money from people with no proof of any wrongdoing, and without filing criminal charges. How does this work, and what happens to the money?
1000
Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman
Canoeboot – Free, Libre BIOS/UEFI boot firmware
1001
1002
Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)
Based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005—one entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification."
1003
1004
Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Google for collecting and data mining school children’s personal information, including their Internet searches—a practice EFF uncovered while researching its “Spying on...
1005
The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
1006
Russiagate is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
1007
Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments
Everyone agrees that housing in San Francisco is expensive, and that the high costs are hurting the city. But there is a lot of disagreement...
1008
The illegal city of Somerville
Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and…
1009
An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
The following article, and the two addenda that follow, were written by an investment manager who works with very wealthy clients. I knew him from decades ago, but in 2011 he e-mailed me with some concerns he had about what was happening with the economy. What he had to say was informative enough that I asked if he…
1010
Better than Free (2008)
[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →
1011
The Loading Screen Game Patent Finally Expires
In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games. What’s transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time. Namco’s patent covers “auxiliary games” that a player...
1012
Noyb.eu files 422 formal GDPR complaints on nerve-wrecking “Cookie Banners”
Today we filed 422 + 36 complaints on "cookie banners" with ten European Data Protection Authorities.
1013
The Democratization of Censorship
John Gilmore , an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.
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Cisco’s Attempt to Dodge Responsibility for Facilitating Human Rights Abuses
Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its...
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1017
An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
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1020
GitHub and US Government Developers
At GitHub, we believe in empowering developers around the world. We also believe in basic human rights and treating people with respect and dignity. Today, I wanted to share a message I sent to all employees yesterday that is related to this, as it is important that we share our views on immigration policy with the…