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CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised
Any unpublished manuscript mentioning certain topics, including gender and "LGBT," must be pulled or revised.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
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The Depression Thing
the depression thing: a neat story about depression and mental health. By Zach Holman.
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Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America. The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975
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WeWTF
I’ve started nine firms and I’m, generously, 3-4-2 (win-lose-tie). In retrospect, and I think about this a lot, the only reliable forward-looking indicator of our firm’s success or failure was … timing. Specifically, the part of the economic cycle at founding. The firms we started in recessions had an easier time…
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Being Raised by the Internet
I grew up relatively poor. I was fortunate enough to have a roof over my head, clean water, electricity, a computer, internet, and cable tv. But food was often harder to come by. This may seem like a contradiction, but when your mom has left to marry her uncle and your dad has schizophrenia, you aren’t really in…
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Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
We used to control apps like Facebook and Instagram with our own choices. They became daily comforts, making the world seem a little bit smaller and closer by bringing the people that we cared about together in to one place.
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AI slop is killing online communities
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.
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We have used too many levels of abstractions
A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure tools, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.
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Dopamine Fracking
The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit
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We all dodged a bullet
That NPM attack could have been so much worse.
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CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
We've all experienced frustration with the internet going down. Now imagine how frustrated you'd be if you found out that your ISP intentionally blocked your internet access for the purpose of advertising their software; and better yet, your ISP claimed that state legislators required them to do it!...
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Apps Getting Worse
Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.
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Overly analytical guide to escorting
The Overly Analytical Guide to Escorting
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Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.
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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to...
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Life is not short
The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.
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Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
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This Message Does Not Exist
It can only be discarded
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DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest Is Hurting Open Source
A plea for DigitalOcean to stop making open source maintainers' lives miserable, once a year every year.
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How big is YouTube?
How big is YouTube? It's not easy to find out, but we did two years of research and figured out how...
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Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
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The Other Half
On January 19th of this year, I set off to California to participate in a hastily-arranged appearance in a UCLA building to talk about saving climate data in the face of possible administrative swi…