Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
The majority of US states have something called a "Department of Motor Vehicles," or DMV. Actually, the universality of the term "DMV" seems to be overstated. A more general term is "motor vehicle administrator," used for example by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators to address the inconsistent…
The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene, and unoriginal.
How I stumbled across a fake booter site run by international police, and how they panicked when I started digging
A real bummer — Apple removed Scratch from the iTunes store, so it’s no longer available for iPad, iPhone, or iTouch. Why? Discussion on the Scratch forums suggests that it’s be…
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco
This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager’s git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments.
A novelist friend introduced me to a productivity technique I’ve found effective. I spread it to my friends, and now to my horror management types have discovered it. A friend just told me he…
This is the story of Twitter and the last four years of my life. It's a pretty long story, but one that needs to be told.
The state of Michigan required all public HS seniors to take the SAT last year (~91k out of ~107k total seniors in the state). This generate...
I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it. Here's what I know.
Update Updated on April 29th, 2021. The CDC continues to update its counts of deaths by cause for 2020 as data comes in from the jurisdictions that report to it. The data are by now fairly complete, though there are still significant gaps in several states due to delayed reporting. North Carolina, in particular, has…
Raiding the Global South like a piggy bank.
Alexander the Great tread in the footsteps of forgotten Greeks
Bad managers and CRE bagholders lost, competent employees and internet-savvy teams won ...arbitrary authoritarian control over your work-life is so 1900s
I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I'm writing
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
I asked 124 services to delete my user account. The results were mixed. 21 never responded, and 16 responded by created even more accounts. Some outright lied.
A pop-up newsletter running from August 15-21, 2022
I have two issues regarding Gizmodo’s actions regarding this story.
I am a Scala developer and speaker who was cancelled three years ago. Yesterday I attended the High Court in London to hear an apology from several prominent members of the Scala community for making untrue claims about me on 27 April 2021. I sued them for libel, and they admitted fault and settled, paying me costs…
