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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 742 posts.
MINNEAPOLIS – Young adults who experience annual income drops of 25 percent or more may be more at risk of having thinking problems and reduced brain health in middle age, according to a study published in the October 2, 2019, online issue of Neurology ® , the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology …
The Trump administration's decision to charge Julian Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act has generated significant controversy. One legal expert described it as "crossing a "constitutional Rubicon." CPJ warned that the indictment could be the opening salvo in a broader attack on First Amendment…
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
In this post, you'll find out more on the legal aspect of web scraping and crawling, and what possible consequences you might face.
Google wants other search engines to pay to become a default option in Android. Here's why we're saying no.
Commuter rail stations in the San Francisco Bay Area should be some of the most valuable land in the region (and by extension, the world). So why are there so many parking lots and one-story buildings right next to them?
Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Okay, folks. This is new territory for me. I'm stepping into the world of.... t h i n k p i e c e s...
In conversation with Google Play Store developer support today, they confirmed to me that all new Android apps now require at least three days for approval.
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
BOSTON — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU today asked a federal court to rule without trial that the Department of Homeland Security violates the First and Fourth Amendments by searching travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry without a...
Several websites including Voat, ZeroHedge, Archive.is, LiveLeak, and others have been blocked in Australia and New Zealand in direct contravention to
The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same…
Cripples and lovely women are both tired of being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves constantly being observed, they feel hemmed in; and...
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
We recently met with GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij to talk all about how they scaled a multi-billion dollar company with beyond 800 employees, fully remotely.
Good evening and thank you all for coming. I want to use my time tonight to warn the world about an unprecedented danger that’s threatening the very survival of open societies. Last year when I stood before you I spent most of my time analyzing the nefarious role of the IT monopolies. This is what […]
Hi! Welcome to Big, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
Back in 1998, Tim May warned us of the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: “terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.” I tended to cast it slightly differently. This is me from 2005: Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers…
The First Amendment is not about a law, but rather a culture — specifically a culture of liberty. It is essential to tech, and in this context, Facebook is mostly right about political ads (but can…
As it happens, more corporations – anonymous and public – are established in the United States each year than in any other jurisdiction.
Blogwashing is a scammy SEO tactic which involves changing an old blogs publish date to a more current date to fake freshness to a search engine.
We live in an era that devalues conformity, while simultaneously preserving it in many interesting ways. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Divergent views produce conflict, however, and disagreement, argument, and debate define our current moment. If we merely disagreed on matters of taste - our favorite color…
Question for Quote Investigator: The host of a video on YouTube mentioned a remarkably prescient quotation from a New York book dealer in the 1960s who predicted that telephones would have screens, and people would read books on those screens selected from a large electronic library. Would you please explore this…
Patents give their owners the power to stop people (and companies) from doing whatever the patent claims as an “invention” for twenty years. But that power doesn’t come for free: it’s a trade. In exchange for the right to sue others to stop using the invention, patent applicants have to disclose...
In 2018, Pew Research Center reported [https://www.pewglobal.org/2019/03/04/u-s-german-relations-methodology-spring-2018-global-attitudes-survey/] that 57% of Americans believe that children in America today will be worse off financially than their parents. Since 2013, this number has been as high as 65% — even though…
