31
What is happening in the Arctic is now beyond words, so here are the pictures
The climate emergency requires actions at emergency speed for a rapid transition to a post-carbon, safe-climate future.
32
Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence
Air pollution can have a “huge” negative effect on cognitive intelligence – especially amongst older men – according to a study released this past August.
33
Slow Software
What it means for software to be fast, and why most software is not.
34
Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this...
35
Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting
When someone goes to the lengths of making counterfeits of your products, it's at least a sign you're doing something right. And it deserves a minute of flattery. But when Chinese counterfeiters tool up and make copies of your product, send that inventory to Amazon, then overtake the real product's buy box by auto-lo
36
Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back
Today, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the internet: text messages like...
37
Telling the Truth About Defects in Technology Should Never Be Illegal
Congress has never made a law saying, "Corporations should get to decide who gets to publish truthful information about defects in their products,"— and the First Amendment wouldn't allow such a law — but that hasn't stopped corporations from conjuring one out of thin air, and then defending it as...
38
Things to know about the GDPR, Mozilla and Firefox
Has your email inbox been filling up with privacy policy updates? It seems like every service, app or subscription I’ve signed up for (including more tha
39
Hacker News Highlights, August to November 2018
Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from August to November. If you see something cool like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com [mailto:hn@ycombinator.com] so we can add it to the next list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Listening to The Shipping…
40
Lessons learned from a failing local mall
The closing of the mall’s anchor store exposes how fragile the community’s business model is, providing an opening to shift approach.
41
Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling
YouTube resolution down again? Through a collaboration with another Massachusetts university, this Northeastern team unveils exactly who’s responsible.
42
Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
Switching fully to card and app payments would put access to our money in the hands of private organizations for the first time in history.
43
44
Why ActivityPub is the future
We often tout things like “Mastodon is based on open web protocols” as one of its advantages. I want to elaborate why exactly that’s a good thing.
45
How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
Multinational organisations are collaborating in the open on OpenStreetMap
46
YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form
On YouTube, there’s a long tail of content that pretty much guarantees the inclusion of every potential human interest. There are skate videos, makeup tutorials, and backyard surgical removals of blackheads. And yet the presentation of a lot of this content — especially when it’s trying to attract a large audience …
47
48
Bill and Melinda Gates Are Paying Off Nigeria's $76M Debt to Japan
Bill and Melinda Gates have announced they will settle Nigeria’s $76 million debt to Japan.
49
50
Brendan Eich Writes to the US Senate: We Need a GDPR for the United States
Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave, has written to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, to present the case for GDPR-like data protection standards in the United States.
51
New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ electronic devices
US Customs and Border Protection, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, today posted a revised policy on Border Searches of Electronic Devices and a Privacy Impact Assessment of some of the changes made by the new policy.
52
Illegal Production and Use of Banned CFC-11 in China's Foam Blowing Industry
We investigate and campaign against environmental crime and abuse
53
Politics is bad because we use an 18th century voting system
While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics.
54
Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
Does Google show you different search results based on your personal info, even when signed out and in so-called "incognito" mode? We ran a study to find out.
55
Community-Owned Fiber Networks: Value Leaders in America
Our examination of advertised prices shows that community-owned fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks in the United States generally charge less for entry-level broadband service than do competing private providers, and don’t use initial low “teaser” rates that sharply rise months later.
56
Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
The modern technical interview is a rite of passage for software engineers and (hopefully!) the precursor to a great job.
57
Blind since birth, writing code at Amazon since 2013
Michael Forzano said he has a good “mental map of the structure of the code,” which allows him to help colleagues and provide unique feedback to his team.
58
Why We Disagree with The New York Times
In the early days of mobile, we built a set of APIs that enabled other companies to recreate the Facebook experience. This is very different from the public APIs used by third-party developers.
59
Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services
Anonymity technologies are becoming a legal requirement for public agency and corporate anti-corruption compliance.
60
Police search homes of Zwiebelfreunde board members and OpenLab in Augsburg
On June 20th, board members of the „Zwiebelfreunde“ association in multiple German cities had their homes searched under the dubious pretence that they were „witnesses“ while their computers and...