721
The high price we pay for social media
Sitting exams is unpleasant at the best of times, but my daughter believes she has extra cause to complain. Two of her A-level papers are scheduled for the same time, so she must take a break betwe…
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,047 posts.
722
Mozilla’s Vision for the Evolution of the Web
Mozilla's mission is to ensure that the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. We believe in an Internet that puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe, and independent.
723
Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that…
724
Trump's Trading Card Grift Is Worse Than You Think
Shell companies, rubbing elbows with international criminals, and worse in his scam of scams
725
Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like – not
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post...
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Battersea Power Station in London unveils the newly restored Control Room A
⦁ Battersea Power Station has revealed the fully restored Control Room A, the first of the Grade II* listed building’s two original Control Rooms which
728
McKinsey and Providence colluded to force poor patients into destitution
Providence is a health giant whose anchor is a network of Catholic hospitals. They colluded with McKinsey to steal from their poorest patients, by deceiving them about their eligibility for free care, saddling poor, sick people with crushing debts:
729
The history of the end of poverty has just begun
The decline of global poverty is one of the most important achievements in history, but the end of poverty is still very far away.
730
Reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation
The consequences of nuclear war would be devastating. Much more should – and can – be done to reduce the risk that humanity will ever fight such a war
731
Claims AI can boost workplace diversity are ‘spurious and dangerous’
Research highlights growing market in AI-powered recruitment tools that claim to bypass human bias to remove discrimination from hiring.
732
The “je ne sais quoi” of TikTok
How a misunderstood platform has completely taken over the world.
733
Vampire Attack Twitter
Here’s a simple way to take over Twitter for way less than $43 billion dollars.
734
Is old music killing new music?
All the growth in the music business now comes from old songs—with consumption of new music actually shrinking. How did we get here, and is there a way back?
735
Gemini is Solutionism
While I don’t care too much about ideas and projects that I believe to be dead ends or maybe even doomed to fail eventually, a recent interaction on Superhighway84 got me to write down a few thoughts on why I believe Project Gemini is a really bad idea.
736
How Many Tracks Do Train Stations Need?
A brief discussion on Reddit about my post criticizing Penn Station expansion plans led me to write a very long comment, which I’d like to hoist to a full post explaining how big an urban tra…
737
A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page
Bruce Faulconer deserves better, but the system seems rigged against him
738
Gmail will call the cops on you based on the content of your emails
Correction: An earlier draft of this story misstated a technical detail; Mark didn’t email his photo to his doctor; rather, he took the photo with his phone and the image was automatically synched to his Google Photos account, triggering a scan .
739
Enforcement by Software
At my university, one of our internal software systems allows a professor to submit a revision to a course. The professor might change the content or the objectives of the course. In a university, professors have extensive freedom regarding course content. As long as you reasonably meet the course objectives, you can…
740
Vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 detected in London, UK
News originally published on the Global Polio Eradication Initiative website. The Global Polio Laboratory Network (GPLN) has confirmed the isolation of type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV2) from environmental samples in London, United Kingdom (UK), which were detected as part of ongoing disease surveillance.
741
On Tolkien and Orwell
On first looking at J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and George Orwell (1903-1950) they appear to have little in common, as men or writers, other than being peculiarly English authors with evergreen book sales. The year 1937 was a seminal one for both men and useful for highlighting their different lifestyles, politics and…
742
What is the small web? (2020)
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce…
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Where did software go wrong? (2020)
Software is broken, but it's not because of NPM, startups, AI, or venture capitalists. A deep dive into how we think about and produce code, and how our software systems reflect the manic state of the modern world.
744
Scarcity Truthers
Artificial Scarcity and the Semmelweis Reflex
745
Ctcctcggcgggcacgtag is unique to both SARS-CoV-2 and Moderna's 2015/2016 patents
Using BLAST is easy. I'm going to show you how easy and how to prove that SARS-Cov-2 is man-made
746
How to commit murder inside a locked room
Few genres are more preposterous than the locked room mystery. The premises are absurd and plot solutions ridiculous—but still I keep on reading.
747
Luxury Media
I was cruising through the supermarket when a shopping-cart traffic jam stalled me in front of the “newsstand”. That word is in quotes because most things on offer aren’t news and in fact aren’t magazines in the traditional sense, but single-issue glossies about Princess Diana or Bruce Springsteen or Michelle Obama or…
748
I Choose Optimism
I bet you are wondering about the title of this piece. Has Blumner gone bonkers? Doesn’t she know that the world is on fire with authoritarianism on the ris ...
749
No minimum parking requirements? No problem for Fayetteville, Arkansas
This article is part of the series The Costs of Parking Mandates Find audio versions of Sightline articles on any of your favorite podcast platforms, including Spotify, Google, and Apple. In 2015, the city council of Fayetteville, Arkansas, adopted a radical but simple idea: do away with minimum parking mandates and…
750
How I would sell OpenBSD as a salesperson
Let's have fun, I'm now a salesperson and I have to convince customers to buy OpenBSD, here is how I would proceed.