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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 345 posts.
Article removed for legal reasons, sorry. After receiving a Czech version of a cease and desist letter from a legal representative of A. F., I've removed the article. You'll find articles based on my story in “Recommended reading” below, go read them.
The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect–for one thing, I think health insurance should be entirely separate from employment–but I hate the thought of losing it without a replacement for people...
Open Source Freelancer
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework . Some of their results included (lower is better):
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel...
anecdotes from working over a minecraft economy
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
Edit: I'm putting this up front as a lot of people are asking for it - the hearing will be live-streamed on YouTube and there's already an embedded video on the hearing page [https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/identity-verification-post-breach-world/] . There's a title I
Does anyone have any questions about NAFTA for my PSYCHIC PIG?
A startup called Airmule has recently made a big splash by offering $99 flights to Beijing. Obviously there’s a catch. The catch in this case is that you have to give up one of your checked bags (they appear to book you on carriers that allow two checked bags), and your other checked bag is a courier shipment. So…
Update – the fake reviews featured below were removed shortly after this post blew up on Hacker News.
Since I am not living in my home country, I frequently use two different SIM cards and prefer having a phone with dual-sim support. This limits your choice s...
Annual note to self – most of the world exists outside the tech bubble. —– We have a summer home in New England in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato fa…
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
A 28-year-old Kansas man was shot and killed by police officers on the evening of Dec. 28 after someone fraudulently reported a hostage situation ongoing at his home. The false report was the latest in a dangerous hoax known as “ swatting ,” wherein the perpetrator falsely reports a dangerous situation at an address…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This Daily Mail piece by David Derbyshire is so profound it has been cited over and over: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations: an interview with four generations of the same family about how far they were allowed to wander as kids. It comes from Britain but will sound familiar to
I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years. A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it.…
It's common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean? Let’s look at android marketshare data to see how old devices in the wild are. The x axis of the plot below is date, and the y axis is Android marketshare. The share of all devices sums to 100%…
I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of...
From Creepy Comments to Sexual Assault I’m shaking as I write this, not quite knowing where to start. As I’m sure Susan Fowler and Niniane, Susan & Leiti probably did, I’ve struggled long and h…
I hate telephones. Some rational reasons: lack of authentication, no spam filtering, forced synchronous communication. But also just a visceral fear.
