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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
In 1623 the German Wilhelm Schickard produced the first known designs for a mechanical calculator. Twenty years later Blaise Pascal produced a machine of an improved design, aiming to help with the large amount of tedious arithmetic required in his role as a tax collector. The interest in mechanical calculation showed…
Bill Banning One-Person Trains Would Lock NY Transit in the Past
On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...
In some Amish communities these days, e-bikes are beginning to outnumber buggies on the roads. Horse-drawn buggies, long a symbol of the Amish lifestyle, are finding less use as more people in Amish communities adopt electric-powered bicycles. In small Amish towns across America such as Sugarcreek, Ohio, Napponee…
... submission to the laws of society (George Berkeley, 1712): "And since the bond and cement of society is submission to its laws, it plai...
Always talk to a criminal defense attorney before you tell the police anything or consent to a search without a warrant. When I was a prosecutor, the first think I would ask when given a case was, "did he say anything?"
Item: In the past two years, Portland Public Schools has spent nearly $12.5 million of its scarce funds to clean up the air at Harriet Tubman Middle School. This money will buy an expensive state-of-the-art air filtration system that will make the air inside the school safe for students to breathe. Scientists from…
Snippets 2, Episode 22
Why Google's monopoly on search is a growing problem, from conflicts of interest to SEO manipulation, and why we desperately need a real competitor.
You ever notice that there's this funny threshold for getting to the front page on sites like HN? The exact threshold varies depending on how much traffic there is, but, for articles that aren't wildly popular, there's this moment when the article is at N-1 votes. There is, perhaps, a 60% chance that the vote will…
There may be a scientific answer for why conservatives and liberals disagree so vehemently over the existence of issues like climate change and specific types of crime.A new study from Duke University finds that people will evaluate scientific evidence based on whether they view its policy implications as politically…
George Orwell was greatly concerned with truth and language and how deliberately misleading language is used to conceal disagreeable political facts. To guide writers into writing clearly and truthfully, he proposed six writing rules.
Researchers mined an old drug forum and fed the entries to an AI. The result could augur a new class of psychedelic-based antidepressants.
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...
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Previously in sequence and most on point: What is Success in an Immoral Maze?, How to Identify an Immoral Maze This post deals with the goal of avoiding or escaping being trapped in an immoral maze…
The ruler of Medieval Venice was chosen by an exceptionally complex ten-step process of alternating random lots and elections.
GiveDirectly partnered with academic researchers to find out how cash transfers affect local economies, including nearby non-recipients. Read the results.
With more than 3.1 million views to date, “Night of the Living Dead” is among the most popular feature films on the Internet Archive. The 1968 movie is also generally acknowledged as one of the landmark films of the horror genre, as well as the work that single handedly created the modern conception of the
Art is not perception
I sometimes find myself asked to give advice on how organisations should go about creating software, but often my advice doesn’t gel with those who sought it. Sometimes that’s because only one answer was ever considered acceptable; sometimes I am ignorant of important wider context and my answer is unworthy of…
Fukushima 8 years on
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