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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 913 posts.
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
The public is always asking of nuclear, ‘what if it all goes wrong?’ Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima have now provided the answer.
Twitter is funding a team to decentralize social media. I think they should start with messaging.
Our commitment to support small- and medium-sized businesses, health organizations and governments, and health workers.
Suicide rates can be reduced with greater understanding and support for people at risk.
ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft. We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests. To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for…
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun. 23, 2020-- Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced The Climate Pledge Fund to support the development of sustainable technologies and services that will enable Amazon and other companies to meet The Climate Pledge—a commitment to be net zero carbon by 2040. This…
To provide more control and transparency for selfie filters, we created a guide for respecting personal choices around face retouching.
In May 2019 I attended a talk by Mike Taylor who works on webcompat at Mozilla. Mike told the sordid story of window.event, a non-standard IE invention that was replicated in Konqueror, which showed up in Webkit, which stuck around in Blink, and was now Mike’s problem in Firefox. It was a good story fraught with ups…
After roughly five months of appeasing users with new feature after new feature after new feature , the other shoe has finally dropped. Today, Strava sold its segmented soul. At least, if you believe Strava Segments are the soul of what makes Strava, well, Strava.
The Social Media Analysis Toolkit (SMAT) — co-created by Mozilla Fellow Emmi Bevensee — provides a free, open, and intuitive way to scrutinize what’s tr…
Divorce in America has been falling fast in recent years, and it just hit a record low in 2019. For every 1,000 marriages in the last year, only 14.9 ended in divorce, according to the newly released American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau. This is the lowest rate we have seen in 50 years. It is even…
President Stanley asked me this afternoon for my resignation. I do not agree with his decision, as serious issues of academic freedom and fr...
We're excited to share the results of our 10th annual developer survey! 65,000 developers shared their thoughts on the state of software today.
Groucho Marx? Fred Waring? Ed Gardner? Goodman Ace? Jane Ace? Fred Allen? Ernie Kovacs? Deane Binder? Anonymous?
To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners…
As an independent charity, we rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. I First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of…
Based on discussions with Bruce Bethke, creator of the word cyberpunk and author of its first story, Dr. Joseph Hurtgen and I discuss the future of the genre.
Google claims search competition is “only one click away.” So why does it take fifteen+ clicks to make DuckDuckGo Search or any other alternative the default on Android devices?
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
We discovered the Mastodon peer to peer social network in February 2019 from a customer suggestion and we loved it. The idea of having a decentralized social network, not dependent on one source is…
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
