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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Q: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Tolkien Elves Properly answering the following questions really doesn’t call for long blog posts. So I thought I would publish a simple FAQ-like…
At the cutting edge of dystopia and genocide
The European Commission just released their Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence . They finally get around to a definition of “AI” on page 60 of the report (link above):
By the lights of many investors Twitter is floundering. Its long-time CEO (five years is long in Internet time), Dick Costolo, jumped or was pushed in June, the board is scrambling to find a replacement, and Wall Street is sounding the alarm. The company’s revenue merely doubled last year, to $1.4 billion. Only 300…
A geeky optician lending his expertise and interests to everyone who wears eyewear.
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
In recent months, privacy and civil rights activists have increasingly recommended the use of Signal [1] , an instant messenger app developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS). After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in particular, many tweets recommended using hard disk encryption and the ostensibly…
Chelsea Manning enlisted in the United States Army in 2007. Back then, she was known as Bradley Manning and struggled with gender identity disorder. This identity crisis made it difficult for Manning to fit into the military’s masculine and patriarchal environment. Throughout Manning’s career in the military, it was…
A couple of weeks ago I visited my mother back home in Norway. She had gotten a new laptop some time ago that my brother-in-law had set up for her. As usual when I come for a visit I was asked to look at some technical issues my mother was experiencing with her computer. Anyway,...
Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and the primary client is developed by a bunch of folks at bitcoin.org . Do you care who these people are? In theory, you shouldn’t: all they do is develop an open source client for an open source protocol. Anyone else can develop their own client (and some people have) and no…
New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project
Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of...
Two Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes crashed shortly after takeoff, on October 28, 2018 near Jakarta, Indonesia and March 10, 2019, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The disasters cost the lives of 346 passengers and crew. Black box data recovered from the two planes indicate that bad engineering practices and surprisingly simple…
It seems these days you don’t have to go far to find people that want to belittle Android, often for reasons they feel are perfectly objective and valid. I’d call out Marco Arment and J…
You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.
Quantum computing, quantum Internet, Japan, astrophotography
For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state's censorship has widened: from the removal...
Improving artificial intelligence research with scientific testing, design practice, and meta-rational choice of methods and criteria
Hugh Hancock here. Charlie is currently in a space beyond place and time, folded into manifold dimensions that ring like bone-carved bells. Or to put it another way, he's on public transport. So I'm filling in for the day - he'll be back shortly!
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…
A critical benchmark for image generation models: A partially eaten burrito with cheese, sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, salsa, pinto beans, and chicken.
The Noam Chomsky Website.
Codeberg is moving, and you can imagine, moving a mountain takes time and...
