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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual
Why does infrastructure cost so much to build in the U.S.? The fundamental reasons aren’t technical. We’ve structured our postwar economy to use overspending on infrastructure as a way to induce short-term growth.
Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal. This is hard to understand.
timdaub · Web3 is a stupid idea A long time ago, I gave a talk in front of a full audience talking about BigchainDB, a company I worked for to create a (scalable) decentralized database. As
Homebrew experiences on entitled behaviour in open source, why boundaries matter for maintainers, and definitions for users, contributors and maintainers.
This is a story about how the VPS provider Digital Ocean required me to either delete a blog post or make it anonymous by removing any reference to the person I was writing about. If I refused to d…
A papal adviser calls Peter Thiel a heretic after his secret Rome lectures on the Antichrist draw global attention and a Vatican rebuke
We use some names mostly for boys and some mostly for girls, but then there is a small percentage that, over time, switched from one gender to another. Which names made the biggest switch?
Why this post? Because there are rumours spreading about a presumed “MPEG-Video collapse” and Brownian motion-like initiatives trying to remedy – in some cases by the very people who have contributed to creating the “crisis”. Who is the author of this post? Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chairman of MPEG, but…
Phones are so full of ads that you don’t even notice them anymore. Suggestions and notifications you didn’t ask for, tracking mechanisms you don’t even know are there, services over which you have no control. It’s absurd how much smartphones, a large extension of our private and social lives, are controlled and…
T he Anthropic Mythos announcement is the first time in my life I’ve felt truly poor. Maybe because I grew up on the internet and it was the one permissionless place where you could have leverage and a shot at uncapped exploration and ambition. That is now changing with the gap between models that are publicly…
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
May 12, 2019 @ 4:36 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and philosophy , Logic , This blogging life
this captivating subtitle I wrote really makes you want to read it, doesn’t it?!?
A few weeks before Christmas, an impish chart appeared on the Bank of England’s unofficial blog. It compared plunging productivity with the soaring shipments of smartphones. Typical productivity gr…
=== This is a free online edition of Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades. === Coverted to webpage by Rudy Rucker, posted September 2022, and updated November 2023. === Each story is Copyright (C) 2022 to its original authors, and all rights are reserved. The book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons…
Apple recently announced an upcoming feature for their new Apple Watches called “Audio Intelligence,” which will always be listening to a...
This is what the inside of the cage looks like. Nearly all of the machines in the cage are Sun Ultra 2s. Attached to nearly all of these boxes are dual sets of MTI JBODs ("Just a Box Of Disks") (either 2500s or 8300s). The newer JBODs (the 8300) make up the majority of the storage arrays in the cage. Nearly all of the…
Today we filed 422 + 36 complaints on "cookie banners" with ten European Data Protection Authorities.
[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]
Only 13 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide in 2022, pushing the disease closer to eradication, The Carter Center announced Wednesday. The figure is the lowest annual case total ever reported, following the record of 15 cases set just the year before. When The Carter Center assumed leadership of…
San Francisco—School children are being spied on by tech companies through devices and software used in classrooms that often collect and store kids’ names, birth dates, browsing histories, location data, and much more—often without adequate privacy protections or the awareness and consent of...
Only once in a while does an Internet censorship law or regulation come along that is so audacious in its scope, so misguided in its premises, and so poorly thought out in its execution, that you have to check your calendar to make sure April 1 hasn't come around again. The Draft Online Regulation...
