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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Overwatch Randomized Trial on Gender
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same…
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How Badly Is Google Books Search Broken, and Why?
I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I'd point out something that I've noticed recently that should be concerning to a...
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An Honest Living
What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition.
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Is it creepy when brands pester you on social media?
You're sat in a pub, chatting with your mates. You start to moan about how the cheap lager they serve gives you a headache. All of a sudden, a stranger runs up to you and says: "Oh no! Headaches? Have you tried the refreshing taste of Pepsi® Cola? It's the Flavour That Keeps Giving™!" I suspect you would complain to…
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Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017)
UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse
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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about
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Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters
On the rise of newsletter production, consumption, and monetization, and how email is one of the most powerful and resilient publishing platforms.
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How to fight the surveillance economy
Stop supporting data harvesting business models by picking alternative services and ad channels. Also, please don’t share this on Facebook.
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Stop Reading News (2013)
Discover why constant news consumption makes us less informed and how to break free from information overload to think more clearly.
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Browser diversity starts with us
Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web:
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Bye, Bye, Google
I spent this past weekend de-Google-ifying my life and, despite my expectations, it wasn't too hard to do.
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The Over-Engaged Knowledge Worker
I recently listened to a discussion of knowledge work in the browser. Along the way people imagined idealized workflows and the tools that could enable them. This result felt familiar from concept videos since forever (such as this old Mozilla concept video ):
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Aztec Political Thought (2013)
(A footnote on Inga Clendinnen’s extraordinary “ Aztecs: An Interpretation .” If there’s a better book on the Aztecs than this, I want to r...
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Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway
I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...
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Bandersnatch Shows You What Depersonalization Disorder Feels Like
Recover from depersonalization and derealization2019102 points99 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
Can a new interactive movie shed some light on a strange disorder?
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How Hacker News Stays Interesting
Hacker News buried my post on conspiracy theories in my family due to overheated discussion, not censorship. Moderation keeps the site focused on interesting technical content.
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The AI Threat to Open Societies
Good evening and thank you all for coming. I want to use my time tonight to warn the world about an unprecedented danger that’s threatening the very survival of open societies. Last year when I stood before you I spent most of my time analyzing the nefarious role of the IT monopolies. This is what […]
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We value your privacy now, but maybe not later
Everybody knows these modal dialogs when visiting a website for the first time that ask you to accept cookies and consent to being tracked by third-party advertising networks. It actually became a habit for me to always click through these things and reject any kind of tracking or use of my personal information except…
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Capitalism and Inequality
I was talking to a friend about AOC’s proposal to increase marginal federal rates to 70% to fund investments in fighting climate change. My friend said he was disappointed that she didn’t propose a top federal rate of 83.25% so that the marginal rate in NYC would be 100%. He was joking but his remark […]