Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 423 posts.

Society, Policy & Culture
4

It’s Time to Build

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one…

14

How We Saved Dot Org

If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry—the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)—to private equity...

16

MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier failed to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.