Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Hey, remember that awesome Hello City Planner video about how the Government is going to have to come and confiscate your ice cream cones? I thought the best thing about it was that it was actually created by the SF Planning Department, but I was wrong. It gets better: it turns out, it's a true story!! Before Ice…
There was a cultural divide in benshi preferences, rather like the difference in taste between those
This should be titled Keynote talk for YAPC::NA 2014 . What's up with the title?
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might have mistakenly thought that, when predictions happened to…
In an important new paper, Rafael Ahlskog and Sven Oskarsson show that half of the effect size in observational studies, even in conservative estimates, is composed of confounding.
TL;DR; - they prevent companies from denying services to people that use technology to block tracking and ads. ...
I think I've spoken at length in other places about how I am a very staunch AI hater and covered everything I hate about how the tech is pre...
America's major high-tech manufacturing industries have not escaped the general decline in manufacturing employment.
Cryptocurrencies, Public Goods & the State Late last year, I and a colleague from HKS were meeting with a VC I’d gotten to know in San Francisco. As an opening salvo in the conversation, the VC…
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If…
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Business of Software has long stood as a unique conference for me: while nearly every tech conference I attend focuses on the technological side of delivering a solution, Business of Software focuses on actually delivering the goods . How do you reach people? How do you know you’ve reached people? How, if you’ve…
In the last few days I've been fortunate to witness an interesting chapter in the Internet's history, and I'm trying to compile a timeline of what has happened while the memories are still reasonably fresh. This is incomplete and a work in progress; I'll be updating it, and n...
How do two well liked companies, deutsche Bahn and adobe, advertise their subscriptions? Badly. Deutsche Bahn, the fully state-owned railway company, is a we
Some people who had previously disabled Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3 saw it re-enabled after updating to macOS 15.3.1 and iOS 18.3.1 today. In fact I personally have two different Apple silicon Macs running macOS Sequoia, and after I updated both Macs to 15.3.1, Apple Intelligence was re-enabled on my…
Obligatory: the views and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the views and opinions of my employer. In light of all the hype going around about ChatGPT, I wanted to offer my “hot take” on what the next 2-5 years
Mortgage lenders face destruction as a cartel of Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax work with FICO to drive them out of business. Regulator and anti-monopolist Rohit Chopra is pushing back.
Don't talk to the cops about any significant crime ...ESPECIALLY if you're innocent. Here's why.
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers
Aubrey Hirsch on harassment and existing as a woman online
I sit with an executive, learn how they actually work, and build the software they need that doesn’t exist yet.
Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future. It’s a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite…
The outsourcing era showed that making code cheaper moves the real cost from production to comprehension. AI-generated code makes that problem more acute. ...
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not…
