2521
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
2522
What makes housing so expensive?
Buying a home is by far the largest purchase most of us will make, and paying the rent or mortgage will be our largest monthly expense.
2523
Structuralism as a Philosophy of Mathematics
For mathematical insight, according to the structuralist imperative, investigate mathematical structure and consider mathematical concepts only as invariant under isomorphism.
2524
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.
2525
A Lego model of financial capitalism
Unboxing the dark arts of finance
2526
2527
Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search
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.
2528
Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
2529
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…
2530
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
2531
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Full EU chat control proposal attack on digital privacy and encryption
The French news service contexte.com has today published the latest Belgian Presidency's proposal for introducing indiscriminate chat control scanning of private messages for illegal content. The proposal covers the entire regulation and is therefore ready for endorsement. The proposal is to be disc
2533
Banning open weight models would be a disaster
My comments on the NTIA AI Open Model Weights RFC
2534
A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
Taking a look at a16z’s blog posts.
2535
OpenAI's comment to the NTIA on open model weights
OpenAI’s comment to the NTIA on open model weights This comment was submitted by OpenAI in response to NTIA’s March 2024 Request for Information on Dual-Use Foundation Models with Widely Available Weights.
2536
The Tale of Daniel
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about the strangest markets on the internet. This year I went down a different rabbit hole. Daniel has been a top 5 baby name twice since 2000. There…
2537
The xz backdoor thing reminds me of a story
This xz backdoor thing reminds me of a story I heard from friends that worked at a tech company that made cell phones. They had a great coder that worked on the project, he had put in work as a contractor for a few months, and due to the quality of his work he was hired in full time. After two months he simply stopped…
2538
Notes on El Salvador
In 1995, El Salvador had an intentional homicide rate of 139 per 100,000, the highest in the world and one of the highest rates recorded in modern history. Like all educated middle-class Americans,…
2539
Models all the way down
LAION-5B is an open-source foundation dataset. It contains 5.8 billion image and text pairs—a size too large to make sense of. We follow the construction of the dataset to better understand its contents, implications and entanglements.
2540
Ross Anderson has died
This is not something I was expecting or ever imagining I would write; I’ve just heard. This is a tremendous loss for us all. Professor Ross Anderson, FRS, FREngOur dear friend and treasured …
2541
2542
United States vs. Apple
Apple is being sued by the DOJ, but most of the complaints aren’t about the App Store. I think, though, Apple’s approach to the App Store is what led to this case.
2543
Debt-related driver’s license suspensions in Ohio
More than 60 percent of Ohio’s driver’s license suspensions do not stem from bad driving; instead, they arise because the driver owes an unpaid debt. Debt-related suspensions (DRS) could prevent people from getting to work where they could make the money needed to repay the debt. In this report, we investigate whether…
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What Happens When a Fifteen Year Old Pumps and Dumps with a Net Profit of $800k? (2002)
Ranked among the best in the U.S., Illinois Tech empowers students with hands-on learning, diverse programs, and a high career-placement rate. Elevate your
2546
The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (2022)
A Hackernews comment introduces a new character
2547
VCard and RSS as an alternative to social media
Last year after talking for a while with someone during a conference they asked me for my LinkedIn to be able to connect with me, to which I answered I didn't have one.
2548
EU Parliament commitee approves cash cap and ban on anonymous crypto payments
The majority of the EU Parliament's lead committees today approved far-reaching new anti-money laundering laws: Anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be banned in commercial transactions. Cash payments over €10,000 will even be completely banned in business transactions. And anonymous payments in
2549
Why is it so hard to build an airport?
Airports are a critical piece of modern infrastructure.
2550