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How Homogeneous Is Japan?
It depends on what you mean by homogeneity.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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No one knows how much the government can borrow
Perhaps macroeconomists should think about studying this interesting question.
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Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
Facebook unfriended me. Why? So far as I can tell, it’s because I’ve been using Facebook to advocate for decentralization of social media. And apparently th ...
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Weak Men Are Superweapons (2014)
There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point.
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The Left-NIMBY Canon
Standing athwart urban history, yelling Stop
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FedEx shipping damage creates fractured artworks
Since 2007, artist Walead Beshty has been cleverly using FedEx’s shipping infrastructure to create a series of artworks. He constructs glass objects that fit ex
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Storming Reddit's Moat
A Guide to Reddit, Its Key Competitive Advantages, and How to Unbundle It
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Mammalian Aggression
Introduction
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The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should…
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The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite?
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
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Decentralised content moderation
With Donald Trump suspended from Twitter and Facebook, and Parler kicked off AWS, there is renewed discussion about what sort of speech is acceptable online, and how it should be enforced. Let me say up front that I believe that these bans were justified. However, they do raise questions that need to be discussed…
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51 Star Flag (2011)
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
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I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months
I believe there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will experience a rolling series of “Ireland events” over the next 30-45 days, where the Covid effective reproductive number (Re not R0) reaches a value between 2.4 and 3.0 in states and regions where a) the more infectious UK-variant (or similar) Covid…
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If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
Live chat is for things that can get lost.
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The Lies that can Undermine Democracy
Recent events highlight our need to take serious measures to counter lies that are undermining democracies.
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How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
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What Is Social Cooling?
Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.” And the massive amounts of data being collected, especially online, is exaggerating…
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Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History
The actions taken by Big Tech have a resonance that goes beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics. Even if they were right, they will still push the world to Internet 3.0.
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We need a new media system
If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences
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My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
I'd be interested in a decentralized social network with network-layer anonymity, grassroots content delivery, and customizable moderation.
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Are Experts Real?
Credentials, Expertise, and Feedback Loops
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The Weirdness of Kentucky Route Zero (2016)
In my last post , I took issue with the TV show Mr. Robot for not being weird enough. Although imaginative and compelling, its universe is well-ordered: everything happens for a reason.
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Amazon Co-founder Mackenzie quietly gave over $4B to 384 organizations in 2020
“” is published by MacKenzie Scott.
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Woo for Its Own Sake
Software development is a funny profession. It covers people who do stuff ranging from register twiddling in device drivers and OS guts, to people who serve web content, to “big data” s…