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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Maker culture has gained a lot of ground in the last few years. Maybe too much, in fact. We can of course ignore those people who are only, as always, surfing the current wave of hype. They seldom have any clue of the ideas they are selling themselves with anyway. But it also feels as though everybody else is talking…
We discovered yet another phone model with pre-installed malware provided from the Lifeline Assistance program via Assurance Wireless by Virgin Mobile.
Back to: Did somebody just try to buy the British government? | Forward to: In case you were wondering ...
People who don't know me , and what I've spent my career doing, will think I'm some kind of Luddite, but of course I'm anything but that.
Population exposure to the synthetic chemical Bisphenol A (BPA), which is used in everything from plastic and metal food containers to reusable water bottles and drinking water pipes in Europe is well above acceptable health safety levels, according to updated research data. This poses a potential health risk to…
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Summary: Air conditioning is not a luxury but a life-saving technology that has dramatically reduced heat-related deaths. Yet as heat waves kill tens of thousands of Europeans each year, many governments across the continent continue to discourage AC through permits, noise ordinances, and sometimes outright bans…
On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store called ComradeWorkwear, announced on social media that he planned to sell a deck of “Most Wanted CEO” playing cards, satirizing the infamous “Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards” introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Per the...
Let's hope this trend reverses
The Bank of England has raised interest rates to 4%, supposedly to tackle inflation. There is just one problem with this decision. The Bank knows that much of the inflation we are suffering is being driven by rising oil and energy prices, largely resulting from conflict in the Middle East. It also...
Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity.
Tree-planting has been widely seen as an effective way of binding carbon as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere. But now researchers from the University of Gothenburg and elsewhere are warning that forests on nutrient-poor land won’t be an additional carbon sink in the long term. As forests age, their uptake…
WHEREAS , the em-dash (—) has long served as the elegant scaffolding of the English sentence, providing the necessary breadth for parenthetical thought, sudden turns of phrase, and rhythmic pause;
In the battle between the Online Safety Act and GDPR, who will win? FIGHT! I'll start by saying that I'm moderately positive on Online Safety. If services don't want to provide moderation then they shouldn't let their younger users be exposed to harm. The social network BlueSky has taken a pragmatic approach to this…
The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX. It happened because we were fed a line.
In the 1960s, AI researchers tried - and failed - to deliver machine translation of Russian to English. Overly confident researchers, lazy journalists and far too optimistic tech utopianists all built expectations that couldn't be met. Eventually, the lack of results put a stop to the previously generous funding. The…
Curating and controlling global information flows What’s the Problem? While most major international social media networks remain banned from the Chinese market in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Chinese social media companies are expanding overseas and building up large global audiences. Some of those…
