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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
A new article was published in The Chronicle about me running Sci-Hub, a project dedicated to providing free access to academic journals all over the world. Their goal is to present Sci-Hub and its…
Sounds like the people behind Wikileaks are under some pressure. Since this is unlikely to turn up in your newspapers, I post it here to spread awareness. Wikileaks has a mission of bringing hidden information to light, when it's in the public interest. Wikipedia outlines their greatest hits, including Gauntanamo Bay…
Jerry Brown has proposed legislation that would allow a lot more housing to be built in the Bay Area, and hopefully significantly reduce the cost of housing here. More supply should lead to lower...
The U.S. government has taken the opportunity during the global pandemic, when people aren't traveling out of the country much, to roll out a new platform for storing information they believe they are entitled to take from people crossing the border. A new filing reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol will store data from…
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, the criminal legal system is incapable of admitting its mistakes
What the NYT Cancel Culture Editorial Got Wrong, And What It Got Right
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
Is your vibe-coded app a Crapject or a Gift?
Geoffrey Hinton is a legendary computer scientist . . . Naturally, people paid attention when Hinton declared in 2016, “We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the…
Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I…
There's a moment in the movie Good Will Hunting which perfectly summarizes all the problems with AI slop and online noise and infinite advice content. Sean (played by Robin Williams) is sitting next to Will (Matt Damon) on a bench in Boston Public Garden. I live here, so I know it well. The area
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
Some thoughts on Mozilla for people who don’t know Mozilla.
Based on its own charter, OpenAI should surrender the race
The Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google is appropriately narrow, and if it fails it gives a template for Congressional action.
When I visited Chernobyl 7 years ago, I didn’t think that a similar disaster could take place anywhere ever again, and certainly not in Japan.
I went on a small journey the last couple days to find the original Netscape Navigator “meteors” animation. This one has a special place in my head and heart because it is so clearly connected to my memories of discovering the web as a kid. Here it is in its original 60×60 px glory:
Tomorrow, two high-speed rail lines open in France, providing new corridors for trains to slice through the countryside at 200 mph (320 km/h). One is a 302-kilometer link that will connect Paris to…
Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with unclear ownership
A wolf paces in captivity, teaching us all the wrong lessons about power
How Germany Is Able To Run The World’s Second Largest Export Economy In The Post-Industrial Era “ The Germany Shock ” describes European growth & the efficiency-maximizing centralization of European manufacturing activity after the launch of the Single Market and the Euro . Two questi
SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION, 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1995, 8:00 am SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION: ELECTROSTATIC CONSIDERATIONS IN INDUSTRY MODERATOR: D. Swenson, 3M 7.7 CASE STUDY - LARGE PLASTIC WEB ELECTROSTATIC PROBLEMS, RESULTS, AND CURE, D. Swenson, 3M Company Tremendous static charge…
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
The FCC reached out to me and is asking all of you who signed the petition to also file a comment in their docketing system for the ATSC 3 petition. This is very easy to do and will just take a few minutes. So far there are only about a dozen or so complaints filed. … Continue reading The FCC Responds to my ATSC 3…
Reader warning: there's gonna be a lot of pretend puke photos in this post. If you've fired up HBO Max recently, you've probably seen that o...
What can Reddit comment data tell us about the rules governing the formation of insulting compound words like 'fartface', 'scumwad', or 'assgoblin'?
Blog post by Marciano Planque: EOL
