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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
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Chinese Curse? Austen Chamberlain? Frederic R. Coudert? Joseph Chamberlain? Diplomatic Staff? Albert Camus? Arthur C. Clarke? Robert F. Kennedy? Hillary Rodham Clinton?
My friend Aviv was recently the subject of a popular Buzzfeed article about the possibility of an impending “information apocalypse”. tl;dr: Aviv extrapolates from the fake news crisis that started in 2016 to a world in which anyone can create AI-assisted misinformation campaigns indistinguishable from reality to the…
Yellowstone National Park maintains a collection of sounds and videos taken in the park that are in the public domain and free for anyone to use. The collection
“There’s this flat-earther documentary called BEHIND THE CURVE,” my wife said. “We have to watch it!” Of course we did. My wife will occasionally get into huge debates…
Above my mountain-top cottage in a beautiful Himalayan village, the road ends and the forest begins. After sunset, flying squirrels come out. Leopards
Can a new interactive movie shed some light on a strange disorder?
Despite dropping out, Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg were immensely successful because of the alignment of many factors: connections (for elite universities, attending can be as valuable as graduating, due to connections), high IQ (which allowed them to get into such universities and be so successful at tech ), access to…
There may be times and places where it’s a good idea to talk back to a military officer — but Germany in 1906 wasn’t one of them. So the young corporal didn’t. The corporal — let’s call him Muller …
What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years. I have sold to and bought from Amazon in about as many ways as one person can; I built an auto parts brand …
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
The references to Gutenberg reminds me of a discussion in Simon Winchester's fascinating book "The Man Who Loved China". There the author points out that the first printed book occurred in China about 500 years before Gutenberg. The question posed by Winchester's "Man" (Joseph Needham) was why, with such a lead…
Linux doesn’t have Photoshop. One common rant I get to hear when I try to help someone to switch to Linux. It is almost 2020 and say what? people still agree with this statement.
Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and […]
Twitter threads are a pain to read! So let's just steal them, right? Umm... Nope, probably wrong. I'm going to say very wrong. Think about it.
Short-lived political campaigns rarely build formal security programs and often assume they're too small to attract serious attackers, but campaigns across the United States have been targeted by document theft and credential phishing. Six observed attacker tactics map to a short list of defensive priorities, starting…
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
The problem isn’t your camera, it’s malware. Don’t install any software from unknown or sketchy sources, keep your OS up to date, and you should be fine. And if you do have malware on your Mac, the webcam is likely the least of your problems.
[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years …
On Medium, Nassim explains how once an intransigent minority reaches a tiny percentage of the total population, the majority of the population will
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so…
