Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Dr Robert Smith is a technologist, complexity scientist, entrepreneur, writer and sought-after public speaker. He is an artificial intelligence (A.I.) expert and has worked with clients, companies and institutions across the private and public sectors. Having grown up in Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights…
If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating…
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
This case (SAS v WPL) has a lot in common with the Oracle v Google case in the US.
After exhausting our legal options, Riseup recently chose to comply with two sealed warrants from the FBI, rather than facing contempt of court (which would have resulted in jail time for Riseup birds and/or termination of the Riseup organization). The first concerned the public contact address for an international…
Spurred on by the problems at Twitter, a lot of my social media timeline has “moved out” of Twitter/“X” on to what people mostly describe as mastodon or the “fediverse”. The fediverse being the collection of decentralised “instances” (aka servers) sometimes using different software but speaking a common protocol…
A blog about media, politics, music, film, culture, by Greg Mitchell.
We promised it, and here it is (slightly delayed by a signing tour and epic-level jet lag): "The Rapture of the Nerds" by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross is available as a Creative Commons licensed download right here: The Rapture of the Nerds .
Foraging humans find food, reproduce, share parenting, and even organise their social groups in similar ways as surrounding mammal and bird species, depending on where they live in the world, new research has found.
Our recipe for feeding includes giant paella pans, combi ovens, and a lot of love!
People want things to be cheaper and easier and faster than they are. That doesn’t seem very extraordinary, does it? I mean, it’s not really news. In fact, the opposite would be news…
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980). (Source: https://www.youtube.com/) The slow web started as a vague idea framed as a joke. When we put our site out into the world on January 2, 2011, we only proces
On a Universal Basic Income, full employment and avoiding libertarian traps It's the summer of 1986. T...
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
Should lawyers learn to code? We examine the suitability of lawyers to coding, plus arguments for and againt lawyers and law students learning to code.
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
The Foundation for Government Accountability - a Florida-based lobbying group backed by the richest 1% - is working to get basic income experiments banned by state legislators across the U.S. (This article is also available as a YouTube video and as a podcast episode) As a well-known quote often
I, like many people, have a complicated relationship with Twitter. As Adam and I regaled in a recent Twitter Space , it started when debugging the Twitter fail whale in the offices of Obvious in 2007, where I became thoroughly unimpressed with their self-important skipper, Jack Dorsey. In part because I thought he was…
Folks, I’ve said I’m not a fan of Wikipedia for nearly ten years now. I used to mention it in presentations until I found that eighteen-year-olds would confront me at the end, like I sp…
The global population milestone of 8 billion represents nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth.
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.
After trying many ways to get around paywalls, I've landed on 12ft.io. It's simply awesome.
