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Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
How many Seattleites can walk to fulfill their daily needs?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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The stable marriage problem and modern dating
Attempting to model modern dating using the lessons learned from the stable marriage problem
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Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
This week's bankruptcy of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum, is about more than a robot cleaner. It's about monopolies, Wall Street, and economists leading America on a path of destruction.
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The culture of rejection in computer science publications
Unlike most disciplines, in Computer Science, conference publications dominate over journals, and program committees carry out the bulk of the peer reviewing. Serving on a PC is a yeoman’s service, and the community owes them a debt of gratitude. However, I believe that a toxic culture has emerged. This blog is a call…
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Is there a half-life for the success rates of AI agents?
Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take
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GitHub and the crime against software
An investigation into collapse of Github and how the decay of our tech infrastructure is a crime against software. Detailed comparisons of Github, Gitlab, Codeberg, and more from a distributed systems and software performance expert.
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Why Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Violates the First Amendment
EFF filed an amicus brief today in support of Apple's fight against a court order compelling the company to create specific software to enable the government to break into an iPhone. The brief is written on behalf of 46 prominent technologists, security researchers, and cryptographers who develop...
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Silicon Valley: A Reality Check
The nation has spoken: weird pointless $400 wi-fi enabled juicer company Juicero is the perfect symbol of Silicon Valley. So says the Washington Post: Juicero Shows What’s Wrong With Silicon …
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Life advice from NYC chess hustlers
Marcel, E.G.G.S. and Nathaniel Tell All
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GoDaddy's New "Selective DNS Blackouts" Policy
Now that GoDaddy is a near monopoly (larger than the next 8 closest registrar competitors combined 1 ), and just got bought out on July 1, 2011 2 , they have decided they can defy the sacred. Customers be damned.
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State of Clojure 2016 – Results and Analysis
Welcome back to the annual State of Clojure survey results. This year we held steady in our response rate as 2,420 of you took the time and effort to weigh in on your experience with Clojure - as always, we appreciate that time and effort very much. And, as always, thanks to Chas Emerick for starting this survey 7…
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Obama Calls for Patent Reform to Topple Trolls
In a welcome turn of events, President Barack Obama spoke directly to the patent troll problem and the need for more comprehensive patent reform yesterday in a "Fireside Hangout" — a live question and answer session hosted in a Google+ hangout. The President was responding to a question by the...
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Here comes the Muybridge camera moment but for text
Posted on Friday 31 May 2024. 2,785 words, 28 links. By Matt Webb.
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The New Wilderness
The need to regulate online privacy is a truth so universally acknowledged that even Facebook and Google have joined the chorus of voices crying for change.
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If Not Overturned, Bad Copyright Decision Will Lead Many to Lose Internet Access
This post was co-written by EFF Legal Intern Lara EllenbergIn going after internet service providers (ISPs) for the actions of just a few of their users, Sony Music, other major record labels, and music publishing companies have found a way to cut people off of the internet based on mere...
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Mozilla Raises Concerns Over Facebook’s Lack of Transparency
Today Denelle Dixon, Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer, sent a letter to the European Commission surfacing concerns about the lack of publicly available
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My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer
It sounds surreal to even say it out loud, but I’ve been living in America for the majority of my life, ever since I was a teenager. And for 18 of those years, I was legally a transient – hop…
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An American Doctor Experiences the NHS Again
Two years ago I wrote about my experience in a London emergency department with my son, Victor. That post has since been viewed > 450,000 times. There are over 800 comments with no trolls (a fea…
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The Social Recession: By the Numbers
Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.
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No one knows how much the government can borrow
Perhaps macroeconomists should think about studying this interesting question.
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Duck Duck Go: Illusion of Privacy (2013)
There have been several articles in the press recently about users flocking to DuckDuckGo in the wake of the recent NSA snooping revel...