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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 354 posts.
As cities explore ebike incentive programs and look to model Denver’s success, we offer context on the state of the ebike industry, how Denver funded and implemented their program, results, and recommendations.
Despite aggregate productivity for the US economy having doubled over the past 50 years, the country’s construction sector has diverged considerably, trending downward throughout that period. And this is no slight decrease. Raw BEA data suggest that the value added per worker in the construction sector was about 40…
In 2011 I gave a 15-minute talk to a lay audience in London. The topic I had chosen was ergodicity breaking, and the challenge was clear: how do you get this across? I invented a coin-toss gamble, which has since become a go-to illustration of ergodicity break
An MIT study shows that if U.S. nuclear power plants are retired, the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas to fill the energy gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths.
(WASHINGTON) – Today, the Teamsters reached the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS, protecting and rewarding more than 340,00
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Two bills reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are headed to the House floor. Meanwhile, FBI agents have used Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications, including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a…
SAN FRANCISCO—Technical standards like fire and electrical codes developed by private organizations but incorporated into public law can be freely disseminated without any liability for copyright infringement, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. Tuesday’s ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S...
Today marks the 54th anniversary of the moon landing. In retrospect it has almost unanimous support and adoration in the US: pleasing the left as an example of the power of public funding and the right as a triumph of the capitalist west against the
In December 2023, The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) withdrew its support for SUNY-ESF’s Darling transgenic chestnut project. Since then, we’ve received questions about the decision and what’s next for the Darling line. We appreciate those questions because they indicate a deep interest in our mission and reflect…
Björn Brembs argues that learned societies should lead developments on federated social media platforms, such as Mastodon.
TeleSign generates a “reputation score” and sells it to various clients. TeleSign secretly received the mobile phone data from BICS, a Belgian company that provides interconnection services
Researchers tracked the whereabouts of stolen bicycles in Amsterdam, revealing patterns of activity after bikes are pilfered. The work was led by members of MIT’s Sensable City Lab.
In the late 1980s, there were near a million new cases of guinea worm disease recorded worldwide. In 2021, there were only 15. How was this achieved?
Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximize employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction
Many bad things happened in 2023. You already know them. Many tragic events were so terrible we will never forget them and we shouldn’t. You can easily find them all over the news. But the good things that happened are much harder to encounter, and it is easy to get the impression nothing good happened at all. In…
A speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
Today is the third annual Global Encryption Day, a day to highlight why encryption is critical for a safe, private internet.
The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is...
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear Moore v. United States, leaving in place a patchwork of lower court decisions on an...
Four months after the disappointing decision on summary judgment in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a number of papers were filed today in the district court, and then the judge is expected to make his final judgment. We expect that, at least while the appeal is pending, there will be changes to our lending program, but…
We’re excited to announce new updates that will modernize our terms of service and hopefully cut down on customer confusion and frustration.
Facebook must stop further transfers of European personal data to the United States, given that Facebook is subject to US surveillance laws (like FISA 702 and EO 12.333).
Understanding and identifying when and why people use social media can inform intervention strategies that teach people when to seek connections, social support, or strengthen their offline relationships.
Since its launch, YouTube’s TrueView skippable in-stream ad product has been underpinned with a single, tantalizing promise: you “don’t pay a dime” if viewers skip your ad. But turns out there’s a catch: they’ve made it almost impossible to skip the ads. This is just one of the revelations that Dr. Krzysztof Franaszek…
Only 13 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide in 2022, pushing the disease closer to eradication, The Carter Center announced Wednesday. The figure is the lowest annual case total ever reported, following the record of 15 cases set just the year before. When The Carter Center assumed leadership of…
Office of the President of the Republic of Finland Press release 10/2023 3 April 2023 Finland will become a Member of NATO on Tuesday, 4 April 2023. President of the...
