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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 658 posts.
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels. The package makers, the man page writers. The rounded windows in Qt mixed with the less rounded windows of GTK. The ones who literally see things differently because of missing proprietary fonts. They’re not fond of rules, installation wizards, …
Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data.
This is what the inside of the cage looks like. Nearly all of the machines in the cage are Sun Ultra 2s. Attached to nearly all of these boxes are dual sets of MTI JBODs ("Just a Box Of Disks") (either 2500s or 8300s). The newer JBODs (the 8300) make up the majority of the storage arrays in the cage. Nearly all of the…
The state of California has some of the most expensive housing in the country. In new research, Kristoffer (Kip) Jackson investigates why homes in the Golden State have come to cost so much. He finds that it's down to how land use is regulated; each new land-use regulation reduces a Californian city's housing supply by
When I was fifteen, I worked for a full-service gas station and auto repair shop. I know what you're thinking (unless you're in New Jersey or Oregon), "what is a full-service gas station?" Yes, there was a time when a smiling gas jockey would greet your car and fill up your gas. You didn't
David Owens II: To me, Thursday’s event signaled one thing for me, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but the Mac is officially over. Apple, the MacBook Pro is not a pro-level computer. It’s simply not. Ted Landau: Apple’s desktop Mac lineup is headed for the graveyard. Dead. Done. Over. It has taken me some time to…
I've stopped watching the news a few months ago and it's definitely a trend I'm planning to continue in 2017. We live in a world of information. Open Facebook …
I’ve been interested in BitCoin since the very beginning but, until now, I considered BTC some very nice cryptographic experiment with high potential but almos…
John Gilmore , an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.
How far is too far when it comes to including people with different beliefs?
Nuclear strategy is one part cold logic, one part emotional terror.
Fact-checking some tweets about Linux Foundation’s newest member and their harvesting of other members’ money. Microsoft recently joined the Linux Foundation while still asserting its p…
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its...
This is what we know: On November 24, 2015, the Wu-Tang Clan sold its latest album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin , through an online auction house. As one of the most innovative rap groups, the Wu-Tang Clan had used concepts for their recordings before, but the latest album would be their highest concept: it would…
This blog post is meant to generate a conversation about best practices for using cryptography...
In December 2014, the FBI received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency that a Tor Hidden Service site called “Playpen” was hosting child pornography. That tip would ultimately lead to the largest known hacking operation in U.S. law enforcement history. The Playpen investigation—driven by...
Web Scraping to Create Open Data - Embrace the power of web scraping in generating open data. Contribute to the open data movement.
Education in Victoria is succeeding in some areas, but failing in many others – we have new school buildings, but they are overflowing and the school rolls climbing so quickly that teachers a…
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A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that income is closely correlated with life expectancy, with the richest Americans living as much as 15 years longer than the poorest — and even the poor living longer in wealthy areas.
