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Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
Apple today announced new accessibility features coming later this year, including Eye Tracking, Music Haptics, and Vocal Shortcuts.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
812
Parking reform legalized most of the new homes in Buffalo and Seattle (2023)
Studies from two very different cities showed the same result.
813
Bossware is a big legal risk
Monitoring employees in the name of productivity or security can cause a lot more problems than it solves.
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Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
Why gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
817
The European Union's remarkable growth performance relative to the United States
The EU has outperformed the US on per-capita output growth; in terms of output per hour worked, some EU countries are as productive as the US
818
DEA Accepts Health Agency's Recommendation to Reclassify Cannabis
Determination must be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget
819
SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
By imposing the restrictions on open-source AI, SB-1047 could reduce AI safety, through reducing transparency, collaboration, diversity, and resilience.
820
Call-to-Action on SB 1047 – Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act
California legislators, under the influence of Effective Altruism activists, are trying to sneak through a disastrous bill for open-source AI and the technology industry generally. SB 1047 creates an unaccountable Frontier Model Division that will be staffed by EAs with police powers, and which can throw model…
821
What the data says about crime in the U.S.
Federal statistics show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s.
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Most dating apps sell and share users' personal data
Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer…
824
The Seattle Public Library is reducing maximum digital holds
Starting Tuesday, March 19, The Seattle Public Library is reducing the number of maximum holds allowed on e-books and e-audiobooks from 25 to 10. Please note that if you have more than 10 holds on …
825
Anti-municipal broadband budget amendment gets nixed in New York
Advocates for better Internet access are breathing a sigh of relief in New York as the State Assembly nixed a budget bill amendment that would have undermined the state’s municipal broadband grant program.
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U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade.
827
Llama 3 feels significantly less censored than its predecessor
Compared to Llama 2, Llama 3 feels much less censored. Meta has substantially lowered false refusal rates. Llama 3 will refuse less than 1/3 of the prompts previously refused by Llama 2.
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Women Who Code Closing
Women Who Code started as a community group in 2011 by a small team of engineers in San Francisco who were seeking connection and support for navigating the tech industry. The movement grew…
829
Our biggest ever river catch?
Interceptor 006 captured over 250 truckloads of trash – and counting – in just a few hours in the first flood of the year.
830
How Nestlé gets children hooked on sugar in lower-income countries
Nestlé’s leading baby-food brands, promoted in low- and middle-income countries as healthy and key to supporting young children’s development, contain high levels of added sugar. In Switzerland, where Nestlé is headquartered, such products are sold with no added sugar. These are the main findings of a new…
831
The forgotten war on beepers
30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
832
The Acid Test Clause (2017)
“A contract is only as good as the people who sign it,” was a saying often quoted by an elderly attorney I worked with for the first fifteen years of my practice and I always nodded in his general direction when he said that and smiled as if agreeing. I liked and respected him, he […]
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Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)
We spend a lot of time suing embezzlers. All over the world. Week in and week out. Big embezzlers, small embezzlers, smart embezzlers and very smart embezzlers… That’s right, no dumb embezzlers because almost all the embezzlers we encounter are smart. Some are very smart. Some are brilliant. And, almost always, most…
835
The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes
The FCC is set to vote on April 25 to restore its authority over the companies we pay to get online, and reinstate federal net neutrality protections that were jettisoned by the Trump administration in 2017. Net neutrality protections are supposed to ensure that we, not the internet service providers
836
Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness
Two major problems with a review in Nature
837
Total eclipse of the Internet: traffic impacts in Mexico, the US, and Canada
Cloudflare’s data shows a clear impact on Internet traffic from Mexico to the US, and Canada, following the path of totality of the total solar eclipse that occurred on April 8, 2024
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Deep sea mining could be worse for the climate than land ores
As decisions over the future viability of deep sea mining are under review, Planet Tracker’s latest report ‘The Climate Myth of Deep Sea Mining’ examines deep sea mining companies’ claim that mining polymetallic nodules could be a low carbon alternative to mining on land.
839
German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
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…
840
Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected
New study shows that the default apps collect data even when supposedly disabled, and this is hard to switch off