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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
For several reasons, I am instinctively in favour — strongly so — of remaining in the EU: I have a French wife and two bilingual children, and I am an academic living in the age of the …
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.
The San Francisco Chronicle has coverage of an issue that has been circulating on faculty email networks at UC Berkeley for a few days. ...
Jennifer Doleac reviews recent research that found exposure to lead poisoning led to higher crime rates.
Today, California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced Senate Bill 519 to decriminalize certain psychedelics in the interest of public health and safety and to address some harms of the War on Drugs. The bill would decriminalize MDMA, LSD, DMT, psilocybin, psilocyn, ibogaine, and mescaline and…
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream…
An economic justice organization uses InFlow SNA software to reveal a slumlord conspiracy
When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high le…
Walkable, mixed-use planning is the key to getting young people outside again and enabling their independence.
OR: Claude will you go to prom with me?
A data scientist’s perspective
Last month, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy—what is commonly known as “going dark.” Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically…
Earlier today, a federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request for technical assistance in the recovery of the San Bernadino gunmen’s iPhone 5C. Since then, many have argued whether these requests from the FBI are technically feasible given the support for strong encryption on iOS devices. Based on my…
What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. cover songs to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine.
Slack’s Workforce Index uncovers new findings on how to structure the workday to maximise employee productivity, well-being and satisfaction
They are the example of how it should be, the Dutch ISP called XS4ALL. They were bought in '98 by the former state-owned KPN, but continued to operate independently. Born from a group of hackers and the first ISP in the Netherlands, today they are still the example that we measure other ISPs by.
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the...
To a remarkable extent, inequality, which fell during the New Deal but has risen dramatically since the late 1970s, corresponds to the rise and fall of unionization in the United States. BLOG: Union decline and rising inequality in two charts The passage in 1935 of the National Labor Relations Act, which protected and…
Fears about old things when they were new. Click to read Pessimists Archive Newsletter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Run on sentences, indiscernible insider nods and confusing narrative perspective plague major news publications
