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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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YouTube should give users a way of knowing if a video has been altered
It was the day of the Samsung Fold launch, and I had watched a few videos from big-name tech channels on YouTube to quickly get up to speed.
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Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures
Photos of the Los Angeles River
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What we get wrong about meetings, and how to make them worth attending
I rely on Google Calendar to tell me where I am supposed to be, when and with whom. When the service collapsed for an afternoon last month, it felt like a teachable moment. For a few seconds, I pan…
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Warrantless encryption is a first amendment issue
Encryption is privacy incarnate – don’t ban it
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Notes on AI Bias
Machine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
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Positional Scarcity
Each day on Tech Twitter, we get up in the morning, open up the website, and then go see what it is we’re mad about. A few days ago, it was this: The concept of “pay to get a better place in l…
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Please Go Away, Tim Berners-Lee
Create beautiful emails, automate campaigns, and track performance. Try it now and see how our tools can drive your business.
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New partnership changes everything for the DIY diabetes community
I don’t speak in hyperbole very often, and I want to make sure that you all ...
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Outschooling
A few months ago I posted some data on this blog that showed the growth of homeschooling in the US with almost 5% of K12 students being schooled at home. I wrote at the end of that post: This is a trend to watch and, possibly, to invest in Well, invest in it we did. […]
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Geek Social Fallacies (2003)
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interp
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Things You Can’t Say About Assange or WikiLeaks
A complete copy of the 140 things that WikiLeaks said journalists weren’t supposed to say about Julian Assange
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Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down
To: Omid R. Kordestani Executive Chairman Twitter, Inc. 1355 Market Street, Suite 900 San Francisco, CA 94103
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Mental Mountains
I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better. He begins: UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is dr…
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Wikipedia pageviews this year for each line of ‘We Didn't Start the Fire’
The modern relevancy of every line of 'We Didn't Start the Fire'
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After accidental vote, EU copyright bill faces three legitimacy issues
Domain registriert bei united-domains.de
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Why the Government Isn't a Bigger Version of a Startup
This article previously appeared in War On The Rocks There was a time when much of U.S. academia was engaged in weapon systems research for the Defense Department and intelligence community. Some o…
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The electric car as a talisman of false hope
Electric cars give us a sense that we can have change without having to change. In 'solving' climate breakdown, they are a talisman of false hope.
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Why We Dominate the Earth
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface.
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Glyphosate in Organic Hydroponic Food Production
The National Organic Program (NOP) is now allowing the cancer-causing herbicide, glyphosate, in “organic” hydroponic production.
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The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition
The zero-sum bias occurs when people mistakenly expect gains and losses to be directly balanced in a situation where they’re not, especially in terms of one party benefiting directly at the expense of others. For example, the zero-sum bias can cause someone to think that a resource they’re interested in is limited…
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Arabic and Islamic Themes in Frank Herbert's “Dune” (2004-2017)
Those who are familiar with Frank Herbert's famous novel Dune will notice his analogy for the spice, and the surrounding struggle for it, with the crude oil of the Middle East. The novel is symbolic about the dependence of the West on the oil, and the power struggles to control this valuable resource.
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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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The case for banning ads in social media
Social media has been at the center of a number of firestorms around everything from being intentionally addicting, to making people depressed, to gleefully spreading misinformation and destabilizing democracies around the world. While almost everyone can agree that something must be done, there’s not a lot of…
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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...