Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
I've always attributed slow Xcode launches to Xcode simply sucking, but I've noticed that the FileMerge app frequently launches slowly too. When this happens, the app can take a dozen bounces in the Dock before finally opening. FileMerge resides in the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/ within the Xcode bundle…
Bill Banning One-Person Trains Would Lock NY Transit in the Past
This opinion is a routine ruling over TOS formation and whether disputes must go to arbitration. However, before I dig into that question, I need to note the case’s chilling implications. * * * This case involves the Adult Friend...
A good community can have tremendous influence on one’s motivation. I never appreciated this fact enough so I wanted to write about it here.
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
RELEASE: Today the workers of Snopes.com won voluntary recognition of their union, the Snopes Guild. The Guild will now begin the process to develop a contract.
Governments worldwide are trying to increase fertility with cash. But the most famous birthrate "boom" had a lot to do with science and technology, as well.
sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.
Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction | exotext
When the world's richest man can simply 'correct' an AI to reflect his own values, what does that tell us about the entire alignment discourse?
Last weekend I was trying to pull together sources for an essay and kept finding “fact check” pages from factually.co . For instance, a Kagi search for “pepper ball Chicago pastor” returned this Factually article as the second result:
The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it.
Predictions for 2026 include growth forecasts for various social media platforms, advancements in federated technologies, and anticipated shifts in how …
Inside the effort to de-democratize AI
Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate…
To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what…
A conversation with lead producer Laura Kröger on the making of Odysseus and what it would take to become a permanent institution.
by Benjamin Cook (into by Tom Cooper)
Recently I got a friend to finally join me on Signal. He asked something about whether or not Signal is truly secure and private, like if it was safe from US government surveillance. I told him: “Well, it’s end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t know what we’re talking about, but they definitely know that we’re talking…
Monotropism was formulated as a theory of autism, but as time has gone on it has become clear that many diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) identify strongly with many aspects of the theory.
The great indentation war is over and it seems like we have a clear winner.
The first public passenger locomotive, Locomotion No. 1, began service in September 1825. The first mass-casualty railway disaster happened seventeen years…
In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections , the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or…
If the Supreme Court doesn’t reverse a lower court’s ruling, internet service providers (ISPs) could be forced to terminate people’s internet access based on nothing more than mere accusations of copyright infringement. This would threaten innocent users who rely on broadband for essential aspects...
