Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
It’s the classic librarian’s dilemma: Because no library has unlimited storage, every library has to carefully manage its physical collection, and that means removing books to make space for new ones. On one hand, it’s exciting to bring in fresh voices, new stories and modern research, but on the other, a library’s…
Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.
The “forever chemicals” found in the Cape Fear River were detected through a non-targeted testing method developed at UNC-Chapel Hill that broadens researchers’ abilities to identify the hazardous compounds.
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.
The government has a culture problem, making it difficult to implement well-intentioned policies.
Google is forcing its bullshit generator, Gemini, on many users of Gmail without asking them, and not even offering the users a way to deactivate it.
Everyone has heard about the so-called “types of learning styles” auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and so on. And almost everything has been said about it. But what if there is a different categorization of learning? Maybe one that gives more inside? Well, I think there is. This time we split the act of learning just…
A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 US household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.
Researchers at The University of Queensland have pioneered a simple, fast and effective technique to remove PFAS chemicals from water.
Stability AI emphasizes the importance of open models in a letter coinciding with the United States Senate hearing on AI oversight. Openness and transparency will improve safety, foster competition, and ensure strategic leadership in critical AI capabilities. Discover how open models can democratize
Image SourceThe United States could bounce back from the fall of Taiwan to Communist rule. It would have far more dire consequences for Japan. Consider this post a short, informal primer on why thi…
Learn about five Chinese tech terms: Huidu, Lunzi, Chendian, Dapan, and Maidian, frequently used in companies like Tencent and ByteDance.
My view on the state of social media in late 2023
Here’s how Big Tech is trying to give itself immunity from government oversight through the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
An exploration into the internet's most simple domain names
Since the events of the search warrant by the Swedish police at Mullvad’s office in Gothenburg, we have tried to get hold of documents and protocols tied to the operation. This is what the authorities came back with.
The world has enough lithium, but we need to scale up production this decade.
The full story of the 2021 ditching of a Boeing 737 cargo plane off Honolulu.
Since Google’s introduction of its Pixel 8 phones earlier this month, it has been interesting and a little amusing to me to read the reactions to its image manipulation tools. It feels like we have been asking the same questions every year — questions like what is a photograph, anyway?, and has technology gone too […]
Patents are supposed to be an incentive to invent. Too often, they end up being a way to try to claim “ownership” of what should be basic building blocks of human activity, culture, and knowledge. This is especially true of software patents, an area EFF has been speaking out about for more than 20...
This is the end of the beginning.
Rates of new-onset type 2 diabetes climbed 62%—and type 1 diabetes increased 17%—among US youth after the COVID-19 pandemic began, especially in Black and Hispanic children, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open .
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.
