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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 450 posts.
In 1957, a B-36 nuclear bomber accidentally dropped a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb while landing at Kirtland Air Force Base just outside of Albuquerque NM. Mark 17 hydrogen bomb, on display at the Nationa…
A video of Panoramax in action. Starting out with a map view which has small orange lines for where images are available. Then going into the actual 360 degree images and moving around. Above: a video showcasing the panoramax viewer, with a map to see where (most[1]) images are, and...
The cost of solar panels is plummeting, and this will flood the power grid with cheap electricity. But that’s just Act 1. We won’t stop building solar at the limits of the grid - we’ll build a lot more. This post explains why we'll keep building more,
This is a set of notes on the Quinn Emanuel report on Cruise's handling of the 2023-10-02 accident where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit a pedestrian, stopped, and then started moving again with the pedestrian stuck under the bottom of the AV, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet. After seeing some comments about this…
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The rest of the world is building subways like crazy. The U.S. has pretty much given up.
An investigation into when, how, and why everyone started dressing the same — and what it was like when they didn't
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being…
The French news service contexte.com has today published the latest Belgian Presidency's proposal for introducing indiscriminate chat control scanning of private messages for illegal content. The proposal covers the entire regulation and is therefore ready for endorsement. The proposal is to be disc
Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023 , compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% of grades were As in 2020-2021, 10%…
I know I'm not alone in having a relationship with the orange site that is... weird. I generally dislike the culture there, it's almost impossible to read any of the comments without being frustrated about the industry I work in or am adjacent to and some of the people who inhabit it; but as a link aggregator of stuff…
Answering the age-old question: why do bad decisions happen to good companies?
I offer "no economic boost," you receive "P(doom)"
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the...
A Reckoning for Social Psychology
Operating a business is risky: you can't ever be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll show up looking for. If you guess wrong, you'll either have too few workers to serve the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around and wait for customers. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."
How do we prepare them for what we're not prepared for?
10 years on, some things have changed and some did not
Apple is being sued by the DOJ, but most of the complaints aren’t about the App Store. I think, though, Apple’s approach to the App Store is what led to this case.
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.
