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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Q: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Tolkien Elves Properly answering the following questions really doesn’t call for long blog posts. So I thought I would publish a simple FAQ-like…
At the cutting edge of dystopia and genocide
The European Commission just released their Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence . They finally get around to a definition of “AI” on page 60 of the report (link above):
By the lights of many investors Twitter is floundering. Its long-time CEO (five years is long in Internet time), Dick Costolo, jumped or was pushed in June, the board is scrambling to find a replacement, and Wall Street is sounding the alarm. The company’s revenue merely doubled last year, to $1.4 billion. Only 300…
A geeky optician lending his expertise and interests to everyone who wears eyewear.
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
Chelsea Manning enlisted in the United States Army in 2007. Back then, she was known as Bradley Manning and struggled with gender identity disorder. This identity crisis made it difficult for Manning to fit into the military’s masculine and patriarchal environment. Throughout Manning’s career in the military, it was…
Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and the primary client is developed by a bunch of folks at bitcoin.org . Do you care who these people are? In theory, you shouldn’t: all they do is develop an open source client for an open source protocol. Anyone else can develop their own client (and some people have) and no…
New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project
You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.
Quantum computing, quantum Internet, Japan, astrophotography
Improving artificial intelligence research with scientific testing, design practice, and meta-rational choice of methods and criteria
Hugh Hancock here. Charlie is currently in a space beyond place and time, folded into manifold dimensions that ring like bone-carved bells. Or to put it another way, he's on public transport. So I'm filling in for the day - he'll be back shortly!
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…
A critical benchmark for image generation models: A partially eaten burrito with cheese, sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, salsa, pinto beans, and chicken.
The Noam Chomsky Website.
We are living through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon, usually in the context of some complaint or other about...
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
22nd May 1990. The two Yemens, north and south, become one. The mood of the world seems to be for the dissolution of old animosities. In that same week, East and West Germany sign a treaty to begin reunification, the US and USSR agree to destroy their chemical weapons, and the World Health Organisation stops…
As you might remember, the FDA stomped on 23andMe for using too many irresponsible genetic tests that purported to tell you things about yourself and your health with limited support. They eventual…
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.
Fior di Battaglia = Flower of Battle = Flos Duellatorum , a combat manual created in the first decade of 15th cent. "Like people today,...
