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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
ETH Zurich researchers have developed a process that can be used on site to render environmental toxins such as DDT and lindane harmless and convert them into valuable chemicals – a breakthrough for the remediation of contaminated sites and a sustainable circular economy.
We’re excited to announce new updates that will modernize our terms of service and hopefully cut down on customer confusion and frustration.
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about the strangest markets on the internet. This year I went down a different rabbit hole. Daniel has been a top 5 baby name twice since 2000. There…
Links 'n' updates
It needs to be said again, perhaps this time more strongly. Your Blog is The ...
With only days to go before the final EU debate and vote on the new Copyright Directive (we're told the debate will be at 0900h CET on Tuesday, 26 March, and the vote will happen at 1200h CET), things could not be more urgent and fraught. That's why today's announcement by Poland's Platformy...
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.
In a dramatic middle-of-the-night stand off, a bipartisan set of lawmakers pushing for true reform and privacy protections for Americans bought us some more time to fight! They are holding out for, at a minimum, the requirement of an actual probable cause warrant for FBI access to information...
Candiru is a secretive Israel-based company that sells spyware exclusively to governments. Using Internet scanning, we identified more than 750 websites linked to Candiru’s spyware infrastructure. We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter…
What better way to start off the new year than with a little rant.
I’m continuing my coverage of dangerous Internet bills in the California legislature. This job is especially challenging during an election year, when legislators rally behind the “protect the kids” mantra to pursue bills that are likely to hurt, or at...
When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there’d be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn’t believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G…
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
AI and Corporate Interests Gutted an Artist's Oasis
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
I’m afraid of a robot taking my job. I don’t care about the job part much, I’m afraid of the actual robot. To replace my job it’d need to exhibit human level intelligence. That’s scary. Before that happens though, maybe some of its infantile, and less scary, brethren can make my job a bit easier. […]
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.
About Koda's task and where Koda works
Hints of discrimination and lack of principled reasoning in frontier AI systems
The word "collapse" appears more and more often in recent political debate. Online, in the media, in the Academia, and in radical politic...
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
People struggling with their mental health are more likely to browse negative content online, and in turn, that negative content makes their symptoms worse, according to a series of studies by researchers at MIT.
