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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a fascinating episode in history. Neville Chamberlain’s first plane ride was a trip to meet Adolf Hitler. The British Prime Minister was taken by Hitler’s charisma. He believed the German leader when he promised not to invade Czechoslovakia. After his triumphant return from Germany…
In a post to China’s popular WeChat platform last week, one writer bemoaned the shocking loss of nearly a full decade of information from the early days of the country’s domestic internet. Within hours the writer's reflections had vanished too.
Bipartisan Alliance, a Society for the Study of the US Constitution, and of Human Nature, where Republicans and Democrats meet.
In 1987, Apple released this concept video for Knowledge Navigator, a voice-based assistant combined with a touchscreen tablet computer. Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor’s calendar is September 16, and he’s looking for a 2006…
Throughout 2025, I spoke a few times about our home energy solution, including our grid usage, our solar array and our Tesla Powerwall batteries. Now that I have a full year of data, I wanted to take a look at exactly how everything is working out, and, in alignment with
One of my favorite things in the world is the very specific, strange competencies that people develop over the course of a job. Carpenters might be able to estimate the length of anything just by looking at it, architects might be able to quickly sketch a remarkably accurate picture from memory, etc.
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
We must look to the past — to the World's Fairs — to build the future.
Paul Graham published a simplified version of his essay on income inequality . Here's my simplified response: It is true that many social...
So it’s borderline useless for all but the simplest use cases, and even there it does a very subpar job. I’d like to have an inline image every now and then, or organize things in some multi-column layouts or the like, or a table. 19th century newspapers could do this, and if your technology can’t emulate typography…
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, gave an interesting talk at NDSS 2024 titled "AI, Encryption, and the Sins of the 90s".
People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not?
While my last post covered my previous year traveling, writing and programming [http://old.alexmaccaw.com/posts/traveling_writing_programming], this article will go into the specifics of planning your own round the world trip, including flights, costs, activities and accommodation. I'll show you how affordable…
Was GitHub down more after Microsoft acquired them? We analyzed their status page and found a 41% increase in disruptions.
This tutorial is meant to help find clues as to who is calling you when you're receiving calls from an unknown phone number (a number that is displayed on
A couple of days ago, TechCrunch featured a favorable story about a new startup called ZestCash, which provides an online lending alternative to existing payday loans (I'm not going to link to them directly, you can get to them on your own easily enough). The story regurgitates ZestCash's copy about the evils of the…
Having recently had the pleasure of doing most of my internet interactions on a tablet or a smartphone because my laptop was ‘hors de combat,’ I was able to further reflect on the state of the modern web. 1 With Web 2.0 being already passé, Web 3.0 being not the latest fad any more, and talks of Web 4.0, 4.5, and 5.0…
In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype—owned by Microsoft—was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company’s blog to deny it. Turns out that wasn’t quite true. Or at least he—or the…
A mathematical extension to ACOUP's recent blog post on military logistics
A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …
What happens when 70 million people visit your joke site?
