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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing
There can be no accountability if there is no transparency.
Let's discuss the source for the GPLed parts of Tesla cars
It has been many years since we started working with Tesla to help them resolve their ongoing GPL violations. However, Tesla has still not provided the necessary source code for their cars (a benefit of ownership enshrined in the GPL, which Tesla chooses to use) and the incomplete versions of source they have released…
The crisis in physics is not only about physics
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
The best-kept secret of Dutch biking: the Dutch hardly bike at all
Here is perhaps the most shocking chart in all of Dutch transportation:
Land Use
How is humanity using the Earth’s land? And how can we decrease our land use so that more land is left for wildlife?
Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours
Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and no…
Internet
More than half of the world is online, but the Internet is still young.
Mass cellphone surveillance experiment in Spain
Spanish Statistics Institute will track all cellphones for eight days (2 min, link in Spanish, via) A few facts first: Carriers geotrack all users by default, using cell tower triangulation. They also store logs of your calls and sms, but that is
Offline-Pedia converts old televisions into Wikipedia readers (2018)
There are villages in the Ecuadorian Andes that are so small you cannot find them on a map. Cajas Juridica is one such place, located just 13km north of the equator. But two engineering students, Joshua Salazar and Jorge Vega, and the staff of Yachay Tech University have figured out a way to give discarded….
The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
We use some names mostly for boys and some mostly for girls, but then there is a small percentage that, over time, switched from one gender to another. Which names made the biggest switch?
Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace
Productivity inspiration and tactical advice that's actually useful.
Patents are about sharing information – don't shroud them in secrecy
Patents give their owners the power to stop people (and companies) from doing whatever the patent claims as an “invention” for twenty years. But that power doesn’t come for free: it’s a trade. In exchange for the right to sue others to stop using the invention, patent applicants have to disclose...
Airbnb in the Himalayas
Above my mountain-top cottage in a beautiful Himalayan village, the road ends and the forest begins. After sunset, flying squirrels come out. Leopards
What Percentage of Americans Own Guns?
Read Gallup's short answer to this common question about gun ownership, including what percentages of major demographic subgroups own guns.
Signal Technology Foundation is now open for donations
You can now donate to support Signal, the secure messaging service, directly.
“May You Live in Interesting Times”
Chinese Curse? Austen Chamberlain? Frederic R. Coudert? Joseph Chamberlain? Diplomatic Staff? Albert Camus? Arthur C. Clarke? Robert F. Kennedy? Hillary Rodham Clinton?
We Never Paid for Journalism
In 2006 at around 4 am, a man appears at the door of a security booth in Downtown Los Angeles. He slowly opens the door, being careful not to be noticed. He grabs the key attached to a small crowbar h
Update on free software and telemetry
Telemetry services and GitLab. (GitLab CE will continue to be free software)
Impact Speed and a Pedestrian's Risk of Severe Injury or Death
This study examines how vehicle speed influences the probability that a pedestrian struck by a vehicle will sustain severe injuries or die.
We are leaving the Apple App Store and all its problems
For many years developers were not particularly satisfied with Apple's AppStore. It creates an artificial frontier between users and developers. Developer can not inform users about updates, tips, issues or fixes, and users often turn to the AppStore with one star reviews and negative comments instead of reaching out…
Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]