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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,072 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker (1985)
Harry Truman was President and Sputnik was a word that only Russian language experts knew when Doug Engelbart first thought about displaying words and images on radar screens, storing them in computers, and manipulating them with levers and buttons and keyboards. For over thirty years, Engelbart has been trying to…
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Armada: Encrypted, Open-Source, Discord Alternative (Built on Nostr)
A free, open source, end-to-end encrypted Discord alternative: servers, channels, voice, and moderation, with no company in the middle. Now in open beta.
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ICANN Rejects .ORG Sale to Private Equity Firm
In a stunning victory for nonprofits and NGOs around the world working in the public interest, ICANN today roundly rejected Ethos Capital’s plan to transform the .ORG domain registry into a heavily indebted for-profit entity. This is an important victory that recognizes the registry’s long legacy...
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Getting to work on diversity at Google
We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the is…
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Our approach to age prediction
ChatGPT is rolling out age prediction to estimate if accounts are under or over 18, applying safeguards for teens and refining accuracy over time.
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Thoughts about Twitter
nolan caudill's internet house
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How privatization increases inequality
Inequality in the United States, which began its most recent rise in the late 1970s, continues to surge in the...
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A Storage Crisis
The best new phones come with the ability to shoot 108 megapixel photos, record 4K video with stereo sound, and pack the results into a terabyte of onboard storage. But what do you do when that sto…
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Statement on 4 Years of GDPR
When the GDPR became applicable on 25 May 2018, it was perceived as a watershed moment. The past 4 years have shown that a law alone does not change business models.
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Linux – The beginning of the end?
Important article slash rant about the recent story involving Linus Torvalds and his behavior in the Linux kernel development circles, the subsequent apology, the fallout, and the disturbing implications and ramifications of the whole affair on the long-term survival of Linux as a whole
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Has the lead-crime hypothesis been debunked?
A couple of months ago a new paper was released that examined the lead-crime hypothesis. Its conclusion is that there's little evidence for an association, and if there is one it's pretty small. I haven't commented on it, but not because of its negative conclusion. It's because the paper is a meta-analysis. I'm fairly…
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There are too many video games
Let's marinate in some hard truths. Dissect what is in front of our eyes.
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The truth about soft plastic recycling points at supermarkets
🕵️ 40 bundles of soft plastic packaging waste were tracked through take-back schemes across England over 12 months.
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The Importance of India
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here. “Quantity has a quality of its own”–Attribution contested A significant factor in the power of states throughout history has been sheer numbers. Spain was able to control an overseas empire to a significantly greater degree than Portugal…
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A fourth of U.S. health visits now delivered by non-physicians
Health care provided by nurse practitioners and physician assistants expected to rise
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The Peking Duck Exemption
Most food safety regulations say that Peking duck should be illegal. But it's not, so what gives?
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U.S. border surveillance towers have always been broken
A new bombshell scoop from NBC News revealed an internal U.S. Border Patrol memo claiming that 30 percent of camera towers that compose the agency's "Remote Video Surveillance System" (RVSS) program are broken. Except, this isn't a bombshell. What should actually be shocking is that Congressional leaders are acting…
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Greece’s Proposals to End the Crisis
The only antidote to propaganda and malicious ‘leaks’ is transparency. After so much disinformation on my presentation at the Eurogroup of the Greek government’s position, the only response is to post the precise words uttered within. Read them and judge for yourselves whether the Greek government’s proposals…
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Anger, Anxiety and Agency
Who is the AI villain we should be angry at?
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The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis
As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internet
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Mortgages are a manufactured product (2022)
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
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People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads
At least, not according to Facebook data
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The dark side of account bans
I recently lost my Facebook account for two months, and was significantly cut off from certain aspects of society during that time. This is the dark side of account bans.