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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
Update: figures now in from Imperial. See below. Further update: figures in from Nottingham too. Further update: figures now in from Oxford. Final update: figures in from LSE. A little over two yea…
I am watching a lot of investing videos on youtube recently. I like to watch them while I eat, or they play in the background while I do something else. I…
I wanted to check the going rate used Nintendo Wii consoles. Sifting through Kijiji was slow and only showed me the price of things which not sold. So I turned to Priceonomics, a site which is supp…
If I ask you to think of an elephant do you see an elephant in your head when you close your eyes? I don’t. Regardless of how descriptive the imagery, story or text I can’t create any pictures in m…
The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the kind of software engineer who dives into the literature to see how ideas were…
Us denizens of the Internet have become familiar with concepts that were foreign more than a decade ago, one of the most that causes the most influence is going viral. There’s so much variety on the web with content providing the impression that anything could essentially make you rich. However, hid
is it safe to travel these days?
Many new technologies have unexpected impacts on the physical or social world in which we live.
My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this…
David Owens II: To me, Thursday’s event signaled one thing for me, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but the Mac is officially over. Apple, the MacBook Pro is not a pro-level computer. It’s simply not. Ted Landau: Apple’s desktop Mac lineup is headed for the graveyard. Dead. Done. Over. It has taken me some time to…
(I wrote this in reference to this memo and the ensuing uproar) First off, his argument had some flaws. For example, even if he was correct about personality differences between men and women being…
I've stopped watching the news a few months ago and it's definitely a trend I'm planning to continue in 2017. We live in a world of information. Open Facebook …
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
On the whole, I got a great response to my request for feedback about how YC could encourage female founders. It's clear there are two separate problems: 1) Some women already starting startups...
I was just reminded of an event I inadvertently caused. I found some screenshots I took of a few websites. The websites all touched on a joke I made. I wrote it on a subreddit dedicated to finding comedy in programming topics: /r/ProgrammerHumor.
My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance.
In my first post on a possible solution to COVID-19 I hypothesised that there would be gene deletion mutants to be found in the SARS-CoV-2 viral strains out in the world and that we would find them if we looked.
Originally published: December 2021 When price inflation occurs, it can be a very challenging time for everyone. In that type of environment, prices of goods and services often go up faster than wages, and the public and policymakers wish to constrain them. Historically, when price inflation becomes rampant…
You might have heard that C2PA is a technology that will miraculously save us from rampant AI forgeries, by having cameras cryptographically sign the images they capture. Hooray for cryptography !
My approach focuses on nervous system regulation and uses somatic awareness and emotional embodiment to help you get out of your own way and grow beyond unhelpful patterns.
—Sure is. I thought, "This is where we'll put the programs. On the file system. And since they're gonna be made out of files, I'll stick the word "Files" on the end. With a space in the middle. People are going to be typing this all the time, so they'll want it to be as long and descriptive as possible."
The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and wea
Alex Moon is an Australian-British software engineer and artist based in the North East of England.
Apple and Google released a joint specification that allows both iPhones and Android devices to do contact tracing on a global scale. Even though "privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance", this is a game changing event that has grave consequences. We must stop Apple and Google in their tracks. Or…
