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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
3242
The Market for Lemons
New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?
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An official atlas of North Korea
A North Korean atlas that shows the world from the perspective of one of the most isolated countries on the planet.
3244
To the Pirate Bay: a modest proposal
Back to: A writing experiment I plan to try | Forward to: PSA: Amazon order cancellations
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HK's extradition law: Not just HK people have reason to fear Chinese “justice”
By Jerome A. Cohen It’s not only “Hong Kong people” whose fate is at stake here. Anyone passing through Hong Kong airport could be detained and sent to China (compare the Huawei Vancouver extradition case). Even people who have been extradited by a third jurisdiction to Hong Kong could be subject t
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iOS 8 Privacy Updates
A summary of all iOS 8 Security and Privacy updates and their importance.
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She went to sleep and woke up 30 years later (1998)
The real-life story of Annie Shapiro - who fell into a coma at age 50 in 1963 - is more remarkable than the movie based on her miraculous re-awakening.
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1960s IT department
In the late '60's I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women…
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Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
The struggle for distinction
3250
David Rosenthal on cryptocurrencies
I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker in Stanford's EE380 course who had to cancel. Below the fold is a hastily updated vers...
3251
Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books
A recent judgement makes it a breach of copyright to sell pre-owned eBooks. Do publishers really want to deter everyone from buying eBooks?
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Let’s replace Twitter with something much better
(There is also a Russian language version of this post available, translated and published by SoftDroid on 2017-04-12.) I love Twitter. I love that by following certain people, my timeline has become a stream of interesting and entertaining information. I love that sometimes I am able to fit my little publication just…
3254
Goodbye Facebook.
Let’s get something straight: This is not a Facebook hate post. That being said, I’m running a little experiment of disabling my Facebook account. Why you ask? I first joined Facebook t…
3255
“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain
This case involves Project Bluebird, a social media service previously named “twitter.new” and renamed to tweet.app immediately after this ruling (for reasons this post makes obvious). Project Bluebird’s service is designed to reimagine the Twitter service that Musk imploded when...
3256
Getting around the London 2012 branding police
The Guardian reported the other day on the London 2012 Olympics branding police who ensure that words like London, 2012 or Games aren't be...
3257
Meanwhile, at code.org
In Mindstorms I made the claim that children can learn to program and that learning to program can affect the way they learn everything else. I had in mind something like the process of re-empowerment of probability: the ability to program would allow a student to learn and use powerful forms of proba- bilistic ideas…
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“This resentment runs deep and is stunningly widespread”
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/opinion/apple-app-store-hey.html
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How Hacker News Stays Interesting
Hacker News buried my post on conspiracy theories in my family due to overheated discussion, not censorship. Moderation keeps the site focused on interesting technical content.
3261
The Villain of CRISPR
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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Memex is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed (2020)
How to keep an external brain using ideas from 1945 and technology from 2023.
3264
The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
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The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008)
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...
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Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)
First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.
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Microsoft is driving users away
What will be the end of Windows? Microsoft.
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Girls Who Code
I feel badly for Paul Graham because he's being made out to be something I am sure he is not. But the brouhaha that he unleashed about women founders, women coders, and women hackers is a good thing because we ought to be having a broader conversation about these issues. Paul asks "God knows what […]