12811
Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,070 posts.
12812
The facts about a recent counterfeiting case brought by the U.S. government
In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012, and we have received a number of questions about this case and our role in it. Although the case was not one that we brought, the questions raised recently have caused us...
12813
Init Freedom
Free GNU+Linux base OS. Devuan is a fork of Debian without systemd. Devuan provides a safe upgrade path from Debian, to ensure the right to Init Freedom and avoid entanglement.
12814
Behind Trump’s victory: Divisions by race, gender, education
Donald Trump's win followed a campaign that revealed deep divisions that were as wide and in some cases wider than in previous elections.
12815
Updated WHO recommendations for international traffic in relation to COVID-19 outbreak
This document provides updated recommendations for international traffic in relation to the COVID-19 outbreak, in light of the rapidly evolving situation. It supersedes the advice published on 27 January 2020.On 30 January 2020, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, following the advice of the…
12816
What Percentage of Americans Own Guns?
Read Gallup's short answer to this common question about gun ownership, including what percentages of major demographic subgroups own guns.
12817
Breakdown of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions by sector
How much do electricity, transport, and land use contribute to different greenhouse gas emissions?
12818
USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard Chan School’s Atul Gawande.
12819
COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the world. Explore global data and research to understand its impact, spread, and global response.
12820
Only 2% of federal criminal defendants went to trial in 2018, and most who did were found guilty
Trials are rare in the federal criminal justice system: Just 2% of criminal defendants went to trial in fiscal 2018. Acquittals are even rarer.
12821
Demonstrations and Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020
The report covers 2020 trends in political violence and demonstrations in the US, focusing on the BLM movement.
12822
12823
Impact Speed and a Pedestrian's Risk of Severe Injury or Death
This study examines how vehicle speed influences the probability that a pedestrian struck by a vehicle will sustain severe injuries or die.
12824
Rent Control
New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in […]
12825
Net migration to the UK
An overview of net migration in the UK – defined as the difference between immigration and emigration of people moving for at least a year.
12826
Human Height
The average height of a population can inform us about the nutrition and living conditions of populations in the past for which we have little other data.
12827
Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
12828
What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able t…
12829
Who Owns the Federal Reserve Banks?
Is the Fed public or private? It's both: the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
12830
Global Covid-19 Case Fatality Rates
This page is updated regularly as new information emerges. It sets out the current Case Fatality Rate (CFR) estimates, the country-specific issues affecting the CFR, and provides a current best estimate of the CFR, and more importantly, the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR).
12831
Better Genderless Pronouns in English
Writing or speaking English, we always face a conundrum when we need a pronoun to refer to a person without specifying gender. Previously we needed a way to cover both male and female; nowadays some people state that they don't want to be considered either of those, and I believe in respecting their wishes.
12832
Protecting Lives & Liberty: How Contact Tracing Can Foil COVID-19 & Big Brother
If you'd like to help translate this comic, click here to see what translations have already been done! If your language hasn't been done yet, send a Pull Request to that repo with your translated comic, or send it to . Thank you! 💖
12833
Confidence in Institutions
Now I am going to read you a list of institutions in American society. Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in each one -- a great deal, quite a lot, some, or very little?
12834
What the data says about immigrants in the U.S.
As of June 2025, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s.
12835
H-1B visas and prevailing wage levels: A majority of H-1B employers—including major U.S. tech firms—use the program to pay migrant workers well below market wages
H-1B is a temporary nonimmigrant work visa that allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated migrant workers as well as fashion models from abroad; nearly 500,000 migrant workers are employed in the United States in H-1B status. The H-1B is an important—but deeply flawed—vehicle for attracting skilled workers to the…
12836
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
12837
Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
12838
Freedom On The Centralized Web
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as clo…
12839
Fertility Rate
Explore changing patterns in fertility worldwide, from birth rates to parental ages, twinning rates, reproductive technologies, and more.
12840
About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use It
The term Latinx has emerged in recent years as a gender-neutral alternative to the pan-ethnic terms Latino, Latina and Hispanic. However, awareness of Latinx is relatively low among the population it is meant to describe.