Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
This week, together with Public Knowledge and Engine, EFF submitted written comments to the Patent Office regarding its Patent Quality Initiative. We urge the Patent Office to ensure that this program actually reduces the number of invalid patents being issued. Its quality efforts should serve the...
Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city. San Francisco has tried, and will continue to try, to ban Airbnb in various ways....
Letter to the Millenials 2
by Nihar Jindal, Hardware Engineer, Access & Energy In the 20 years since the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) first made spectr...
A new study shows that teenagers who had previously been heavy users of marijuana performed worse on long-term memory tests than those who never used cannabis, and they had abnormally shaped hippocampuses.
When the Romans came to Great Britain, they built a bunch of forts called castra, which was Anglicized to chester. So, English cities whose names end in -chester, -caster and -cester were once Roma…
In life, love, war, and planetary colonization, even long-lasting friendships can end if one betrays the other's trust for his own gain. We studied the language of betrayal by observing players of Diplomacy , the game that ruins friendships . In this very popular game, players can form alliances and try to conquer the…
How to make hundreds of millions of dollars by taking pictures of other people's pictures.
Cycling Lessons Learned From Amsterdam That No One Talks About This post originally appears on Spacing Vancouver. By Darren Proulx and Samuel Baron I recently had the honour of visiting Amsterdam. …
When you edit Wikipedia to include a claim, you are required to substantiate that edit by referencing a reliable source. According to a recent study, the single biggest predictor of a journal’s appearance in Wikipedia is its impact factor. One of the exciting findings, writes Eamon Duede, is that it appears Wikipedia…
Highly-accomplished scientists are more likely to have an artsy hobby than the average scientist. And Nobel prize winners are even more likely.
Metal bands aren't afraid to tackle serious topics in their lyrics. Here, we look at metal songs that deal with concepts in theoretical physics and cosmology.
If you want to order a book (or something else), don't buy it from Amazon. Amazon harms its customers, as well as workers, the national treasury, and many others that it affects.
The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone , ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a...
will go to The Electronic Frontier Foundation if Kapor wins, or The Kurzweil Foundation if Kurzweil wins.
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
The difficulties associated with proving and addressing gender discrimination in hiring processes have presented policymakers with a major challenge over the past few decades. In an attempt to overcome gender-biased hiring, a vast majority of symphony orchestras revised their hiring practices from the 1950s. Many…
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told yo…
That's compared with 27% of Gen Xers and 24% of Boomers who say the same.
We used data from EIA to get up-to-date average household electricity consumption. We compiled statistics to compare to other countries.
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as clo…
Wages for typical workers lag far behind productivity growth. It hasn't always been this way and does not have to be this way. These 10 charts outline the historical context of workers’ wage trajectories, and what can be done to fix the gaping disparities.
