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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. Last night after the kids were asleep, I sat down with a beer (Sierra Nevada) and figured out how I could get the data and perform the calculation.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 April 2018. One way to understand China is to look at the statistics. Real income per person has increased nearly tenfold since 1990. Si…
We wanted Alejandro to have a power wheelchair. We wanted him to be able to move through the world by his own volition and it’s clear that the ability to independently explore his environment is important for his cognitive development on multiple levels. We tried going through the typical process of obtaining a power…
Last week a group of technologists, including Bruce Schneier, sent a letter to Congress outlining their concerns around cryptocurrency and urging Congress to regulate the space. Now let me be the f…
Why the landslide loss for San Francisco's school board is a victory for American meritocracy
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A…
One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people. I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ra…
Agricultural economists manipulated data to block Congress from acting on high beef prices and the destruction of independent cattle ranching. Why? Because they think monopolies are good.
An exposé no one will read, about the widespread falsification of user posts in PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001. This is a microcosm of the death of the human-written Internet.
It is now public knowledge that on 4 September 2019 I gave a talk at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. I was invited and I accepted. The report of this has led to a certain amount of speculation and rumor.
While talking to a pediatrician and fellow early-childhood researcher, Dr. Melissa Bright heard something that stopped her in her tracks: Child abuse spikes after report cards come out.
This post describes our analysis of an attack tool that we identify as separate from, but co-located with, the Great Firewall of China.
Some people are probably pretty used to various blocking endeavours on social media. I am not one of them…
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
Jonathan Smith was released from Talbot County DOC Wednesday, April 21, 2021 after 21 years of wrongful incarceration. He was greeted by his two sons, Jonathan pictured here picking him up. (Image: Eric Kayne/AP Images for the Innocence Project)
The Play Store does not run on my old devices; this led me to accidentally experience some joy while using Android.
More than 20 million U.S. households had unresolved complaints against their ISPs last year. Despite wanting justice, many didn't pursue.
I canceled the OnStar subscription on my new GMC vehicle today after receiving an email from the company about their new terms and conditions. While most people, I imagine, would hit the delete button when receiving something as exciting as new terms and conditions, being the nerd sort, I decided to have a personal…
Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in…
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/business/media/amazon-melania-trump-film-critics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IFA.R85v.5ZtNe8FttfaD
When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and media historians could preserve the games that were so important...
EFF recently won our challenge to invalidate claims of the “podcasting patent” using a procedure at the Patent Office called inter partes review. This procedure allowed us to challenge a patent that was being used to demand licenses from individual podcasters, even though EFF itself had never been...
