Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook , so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of …
On September 26, 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam held her first listening session after seventeen weeks of protest. Her government, which had spent the summer nearly incommunicado, had settled on these encounters as a way to heal social divisions and identify the mysterious goals of a movement whose five…
A front-page report in today’s New York Times based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirms that the NSA, like the DHS, uses airline reservation data as part of its profiling and social network analysis of US citizens and foreigners. Today’s report also raises new questions, and suggests some…
Political data firm AggregateIQ exposed IT assets that raise questions for society about how technology is being used in recent US political history.
On the morning of April 1st, the White House issued a new executive order (EO) that asserts that malicious “cyber-enabled activities” are a national threat, declares a national emergency, and establishes sanctions and other consequences for individuals and entities. While computer and information...
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
OSM US is incredibly excited to announce the latest Charter Project: OldInsuranceMaps.net (OIM)!If you’re a map nerd you’ll remember ever seeing a Sanborn Insurance Map in person. They often come in absolute...
Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will cause more harm than good for the Internet. The worst case scenario would be that, in allowing the FCC to regulate the Internet, we open...
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…
California has updated its labor laws around the salary and criminal histories of job applicants. Find out how to stay compliant.
How is history used to support ideology? Is violence by a government against its own civilian population ever justified? Why are certain events given priority over others in history books? This les…
Amidst 130,000 tech layoffs, 62% of knowledge workers say they don’t feel secure committing to one employer anymore.
With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our users can continue to access all content the…
The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield . In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can. The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money. That’s a premise that should make the…
A look at a Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign to discredit anti-war campaigners and journalists
Eric Roberts just sent out a note of concern to the ACM Education Council, and he kindly allowed me to share it here as a guest post. When I read his note, I thought about my May 2009 CACM column …
The Lecturer Training Programme (LTP) is a process that is used by the FIDE Arbiters’ Commission to ensure that those qualifying from it will have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach candidates who wish to become arbiters at FA level and above. The following have progressed to the final stage of the Lecturer…
Today, the Inspector General for the Department of Defense published a report into the DoD’s handling of the JEDI contract. There is a simple explanation for Microsoft’s victory: We were rated equal or superior to Amazon in every evaluation factor. We can all agree that bid-protest cases serve an important function in…
