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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 597 posts.
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
A new book examines the massive health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees.
Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF’s advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle’s website in a manner it didn’t like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website’s terms of use is not a...
As part of the Internet Archive's aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable -- and are pleased to announce that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine. 22 Wikipedia Language Editions with more than
$ git push ... remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects. remote: error: GH013: Your push could infringe someone's copyright. remote: If you believe this is a…
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and …
Drivers already know upfront pricing typically doesn't work in our favor. But what is upfront pricing, or variations of it, looking like for passengers? We had frequent traveler and RSG contributor Will analyze how Uber charges frequent riders.
3 dollars and cents arguments that definitively prove the need for people-oriented, walk-friendly places.
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
In their effort to prevent states from protecting a free and open Internet, a small handful of massive and extraordinarily profitably Internet service providers (ISPs) are telling state legislatures that network neutrality would hinder their ability to raise revenues to pay for upgrades and thus...
Here's how it normally plays out: It all begins when a company pops up online and makes some sort of ludicrous statement related to their security posture, often as part of a discussion on a public social media platform such as Twitter. Shortly thereafter, the masses descend on said
‘Puisque ces mystères me dépassent, feignons d’en être l’organisateur.’ –Jean Cocteau. Click to read Quariety, by anas sabbar, a Substack publication. Launched 6 years ago.
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In his wonderful book The Evolution of Useful Things, the author and civil engineer Henry Petroski shares one of the most famous case studies in the history of design: Before it was destroyed by fi…
Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are… just generous, I guess? But our active users regularly express their frustration that we haven’t done more to make outsiders feel more welcome. The real problem isn’t the community …
A new type of banking scam involving fake business listings is taking over Google [3 min read]
Earlier this year we funded Callisto [https://www.projectcallisto.org/], a non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment. During their time at YC, we helped Callisto send a survey to 125 of the 384 female founders who have participated in YC.1 They were asked if they’d ever been…
One of the things that has always slightly amused and puzzled me is that unicode lacks a "cock" glyph. I mean, it seems to have characters a...
Imagine you are a teacher at a public school, and you want to use a free recording of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in your classroom. As an author of music textbooks and a music theory professor, I am always looking for creative ways to develop teaching materials as Open Educational Resources (oer-musik.de), so that…
In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic…
Forget about Quora's security breach. Their ongoing efforts to block access to their content, including a multi-year ban on the Internet Archive, are reason enough to never use them.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
