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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF…
Evidence for airborne spread of Covid-19 is strong, but authorities underemphasize airborne protections. The curious history of infectious disease reveals how this anti-airborne bias emerged.
When a Southern Airways DC-9 loses both engines during a storm, an attempt to land it on a rural highway goes horribly wrong.
I started using Apple computers — and writing code for them, starting with BASIC — 43 years ago, before the Macintosh, even, and I’ve made this my career. I’ve had all these decades to really, thoroughly delight in these incredible machines and software, and to give a little back with my own apps.
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Yes, they throw snow. But the mechanical design of residential snowblowers is more interesting than it seems.
Unfollow Everything and the need for (good) tech regulation.
Part 1 is mostly about what happened as Bess and I raced against tumor growth to find a new clinical trial that might keep me alive. Part 2 is here, and it is mostly about how this process feels an…
Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate…
Web3 has been a very fashionable term this year, mostly for the alt-finance cartoon characters and tech world’s ultrasophisticated twitter-thread authors.
To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what…
The Agency knew that their best asset for selling their wars was Barack Obama -- the same reason so many in the security state were eager to get rid of Donald Trump.
A conversation with lead producer Laura Kröger on the making of Odysseus and what it would take to become a permanent institution.
The Microsoft and Stripe developer keynotes were both examples of the rise of Thin Platforms
(Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”) Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliograp…
Experience history's greatest journey along the veins of the world. Relive the interactive journey from Europe to China, explore the map of the Silk Roads, or choose an outpost to trave back in time to.
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
Back in 2017 I was fortunate enough to travel to RAF Lossiemouth together with a bunch of Finnish media courtesy of BAE Systems to get up and close with the Eurofighter Typhoon group operating ther…
Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way
An examination of Kitty Genovese and the Volunteer's Dilemma
