2911
Awareness at Death
How many cardiac arrest survivors later have a conscious recollection of their death experience—and are their recollections accurate?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
2912
2913
2000Ad announces retirement of John M. Burns
Earlier this week, John M. Burns, one of Britain’s great comic artists, whose work has thrilled and amazed for more than six decades, announced his retirement from comics. John M. Burns is, without a doubt, a legendary British comics creator. His extensive body of work across the last six decades and more has brought…
2914
Lego MRI Scanners donated to hospitals to help children cope with anxiety (2022)
The LEGO Foundation to donate LEGO® MRI Scanners to hospitals globally
2915
Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage
This story has been making the rounds on the internet with a claim that you’ve probably been told during visits to castles, but, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever. In short the idea…
2916
Why I can no longer recommend a Mac to fellow blind computer users
As many of you will know from personal experience, there is a longstanding issue with VoiceOver on Mac where Safari may become unresponsive with VoiceOver repeatedly announcing the message “Safari not responding.” When this issue occurs, the user's Mac may become unusable for up to several minutes at a time. Sometimes…
2917
How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
The pharmaceutical industry leverages Washington’s culture of corruption to increase profits while everyday Americans suffer from high drug prices.
2918
Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View
Whistleblower disclosures and investigative reporting have revealed a lot about what was happening—and what was known—inside Meta during the lead-up to the genocide in Myanmar, including a connection to a global wave of fake-page networks devoted to manipulation and political misinformation.
2919
CCC Invites to the 37th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg
After a three-year break, the Chaos Computer Club will host its 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) from 27 December to 30 December 2023. We invite you to the CCH in Hamburg for Germany's most...
2920
Reversing 'France Identité': The New French Digital ID
-------------- Update from 06/10/2023 : following my publication, I’ve been in contact with France Identité CISO and they could provide mo...
2921
Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
Breaking through the illusion of convenience that's used to sell us automation
2922
2923
The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
"We have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it." The FTC and states are going after Amazon, largely for stopping merchants from offering discounts elsewhere.
2924
BBC gives up on Threads, sticks with Mastodon
So numerous brands are giving up on Threads by Instagram, allegedly due to lack of engagement (ironically, most of them are still using...
2925
Michael F. Flynn has died
Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,...
2926
Five Kinds of Friends (2022)
The word “friends” has at least five different meanings: Allies Backstage intimates Fun friends Mutual interests friends Soc...
2927
Ági Szabados Does Not Need to Apologize to Me
So, at the opening ceremonies of the Budapest International Book Festival this year, a couple of people gave prefatory remarks before I received the Budapest Grand Prize and participated in my own …
2928
Researchers mined Erowid and fed the entries to an AI
Researchers mined an old drug forum and fed the entries to an AI. The result could augur a new class of psychedelic-based antidepressants.
2929
How China's “debt traps” work
Raiding the Global South like a piggy bank.
2930
The world needs computational social science
The world needs computational social science, and it is not only, or even primarily, about the AI revolution. The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational social scientist should …
2931
Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning
What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. cover songs to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine.
2932
Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.
2933
The Curse of Dialup World
An acquisition gets weird.
2934
The presumption that computers are working correctly
The first in a series of posts on the Post Office Horizon prosecutions scandal
2935
Meta in Myanmar
I’ve never trusted Facebook, mostly because I’ve been around tech for a long time and everything I’ve ever learned about the company looked like a red flag. But once I started to really dig in, what I learned was so much gnarlier and grosser and more devastating than what I’d assumed.
2936
Privacy washing: Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it
Just as Big Oil has used greenwashing to block environmental protections, Big Tech uses privacy washing to stand in the way of privacy.
2937
Weird things you can buy online
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from your normal stuff.1 For example, last year I talked about owning a microscope. This year I debated doing another hobby but settled on a much dumber topic. Have you ever seen those lists of weird…
2938
Loadsharers: Funding the Load Bearing Internet People (2020)
The Internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can’t be monetized and thus don’t have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. Services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries - software without which the net and…
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Japan’s silent movie culture is still going
There was a cultural divide in benshi preferences, rather like the difference in taste between those