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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
I feel like I need to first defuse any idea of antagonizing Americans themselves. The people are never to blame. This isn't a post criticizing the American people, it's criticizing the state of things that makes it impractical to have any sort of economical relation with the country if you are an average Joe like me.
Doomsayers Keep Getting It Wrong on Higher Minimum Wages In Seattle, unemployment has fallen and business has boomed since the city raised its pay floor. Bloomberg, October 21, 2016 In 2014, Seattle passed an ordinance to eventually raise the minimum wage in the city to $15 an hour, giving the Pacific Northwest…
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…
Call you Congresspeople, right now.
Anonymity in the real world is very hard In late 2011 Hezbollah rolled up a CIA spy ring in Lebanon. This provides an interesting lesson in CIA …
Massive banks are now accused of cheating customers billions of dollars in interest payments according to financial reports.
Stop supporting data harvesting business models by picking alternative services and ad channels. Also, please don’t share this on Facebook.
A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years
Dr William Cook, who along with Warren Harris designed and developed AppleScript for Apple back in the early 90s, has sadly passed away at age 57.
An updated version of the methodology to be used in the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, leaked by the news portal Contexte, reveals more details on the approach pursued by the Belgian Council Presidency: The text doubles-down on services that allow people to protect themselves. If services are used t
Providence is a health giant whose anchor is a network of Catholic hospitals. They colluded with McKinsey to steal from their poorest patients, by deceiving them about their eligibility for free care, saddling poor, sick people with crushing debts:
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI. I do not believe any positive out...
It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.
How a misunderstood platform has completely taken over the world.
Japan circa 2006 I stare at the strange looking symbols with trepidation. Fear mixed with equal doses of excitement, is this the time I finally do it? Yes. I gather up the courage and push what I believe to be the start button. There is a whirring noise then nothing, for an excruciating second I think I have made a…
I. H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons:They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the l…
Here’s a simple way to take over Twitter for way less than $43 billion dollars.
If and when you emerged from your happiness bubble to read the news, you’ll have seen (at least if you live in the US) that the cruel and reckless tax bill has passed the House of Representat…
I'm an Apple ecosystem user, owning an iPhone ever since a past employer got it for me to test our company app some 8 years ago. Over time, as I've upgraded, I'
In one of the more bizarre twists of the Dan Ariely saga, there is a huge issue of provenance in one of Dan Ariely’s studies. The study in question is Dan Ariely’s Ten Commandments study at JMR. The hugely impactful paper has over 3,000 citations but unfortunately failed to replicate in a large-scale systematic…
Neil note: I’ve published this with the hope that others familiar with what this could entail will give feedback. As such, what you read now might not be the final version. If I make material changes, I’ll indicate them.
