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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on __AI__. Refreshes about every ten minutes.
Poverty is falling, and it isn't because of free-market capitalism
We are devastated to report that Big Basin, as we have known it, loved it, and cherished it for generations, is gone. Early reports are that the wildfire has consumed much of the park’s historic facilities. We do not yet know the fate of the park’s grandest old trees.
Typically eloquent Noam Chomsky, speaking this weekend at the Geneva Press Club: My own opinion is that Snowden should be honored. He was doing what every citizen ought to do, telling. [Applause] He was telling Americans what the government was doing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Governments as I mentioned before…
Many developers are up in arms about a new policy from Apple that mandates all iOS applications to be written in either a flavor of C or JavaScript. It’s original motivation is apparently to prevent Adobe’s imminent Flash-to-iOS compiler in CS5 from working, but the collateral damage is…
Why your outdated brain is making you unhappy and how to hack it.
The “forever chemicals” found in the Cape Fear River were detected through a non-targeted testing method developed at UNC-Chapel Hill that broadens researchers’ abilities to identify the hazardous compounds.
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when…
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
Today we released a new CDL report: “Legal Entanglements: Mapping Connections of Anti-Offshore Wind Groups and their Lawyers in the Eastern United States,” a deep look into litigation efforts against offshore wind in the Northeast.
Update: figures now in from Imperial. See below. Further update: figures in from Nottingham too. Further update: figures now in from Oxford. Final update: figures in from LSE. A little over two yea…
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
I am watching a lot of investing videos on youtube recently. I like to watch them while I eat, or they play in the background while I do something else. I…
I wanted to check the going rate used Nintendo Wii consoles. Sifting through Kijiji was slow and only showed me the price of things which not sold. So I turned to Priceonomics, a site which is supp…
In honor of Open Access Week, and particularly this year’s theme of structural equity, we wanted to highlight a project from the Internet Archive that is doing extraordinary work promoting access to knowledge. The bad news: that project is also under legal threat. The good news: the Archive, with...
Copyright’s reach is already far too broad, and courts have no business expanding it any further, particularly where that reframing will undermine adversarial interoperability. Unfortunately, a federal district court did just that in the latest iteration of Oracle v. Rimini, concluding that...
Anthropologist Roberto González (Professor, San José State University) examines how America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Although much of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on conventional weapons systems, the Defense Department has increasingly…
If I ask you to think of an elephant do you see an elephant in your head when you close your eyes? I don’t. Regardless of how descriptive the imagery, story or text I can’t create any pictures in m…
The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the kind of software engineer who dives into the literature to see how ideas were…
Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.
Us denizens of the Internet have become familiar with concepts that were foreign more than a decade ago, one of the most that causes the most influence is going viral. There’s so much variety on the web with content providing the impression that anything could essentially make you rich. However, hid
An Ipsos poll finds overwhelming global support for banning harmful plastics and chemicals, with 87% backing reduced plastic production worldwide.
is it safe to travel these days?
