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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 490 posts.
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Dark Horse Discord
How a gaming chat platform is secretly connecting the internet, and defining the future of work
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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students
The ministry of education in Turkey recently announced that they will be offering Delphi free of charge to students of computer sciences. An estimated one million students will thus have access to …
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Lawyers automate this, so why don't airlines?
My working title for this blog post was “Why I’ll Never Fly With easyJet Again”, but that was far too clickbaity. Also it’s probably worth prefixing this post with two things. The first being the caveat that whether or not i ever fly with easyJet again is immaterial to their business, given that the model of budget…
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Google, nobody asked for a new Blogger interface
I'm writing this post in what Google is euphemistically referring to as an improvement . I don't understand this. I managed to ignore New ...
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How to identify an immoral maze
Previously in sequence: Moloch Hasn’t Won, Perfect Competition, Imperfect Competition, Does Big Business Hate Your Family?, What is Life in an Immoral Maze?, Stripping Away the Protections, What is…
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The Abundance of Silicon Valley
Abundance is fragile, it is accidental, and it is the most incredible thing on earth.
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There are many SARS-CoV-2 strains with gene deletions
In my first post on a possible solution to COVID-19 I hypothesised that there would be gene deletion mutants to be found in the SARS-CoV-2 viral strains out in the world and that we would find them if we looked.
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Stop the Apple and Google contact tracing platform
Apple and Google released a joint specification that allows both iPhones and Android devices to do contact tracing on a global scale. Even though "privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance", this is a game changing event that has grave consequences. We must stop Apple and Google in their tracks. Or…
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A Worsening Culture War
When leaders run out of unifying myths, division is the last currency. Why this Thanksgiving, America is a "death cult" versus "radical socialists"
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Vitamin D: the New Covid-19 Chloroquine?
Welcome to this post, in which we’ll be taking a trip through the wild and bumpy ride that has been Vitamin D & sunlight research over the past few decades, and what it might mean for COVID-19. As with my previous post, before any non-specialist attempts to write something on COVID-19, we should wonder: are any actual…
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Assange Hearing Day 7
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH This morning we went straight in to the evidence of Clive Stafford Smith, a dual national British/American lawyer licensed to practice in the UK. He had founded Reprieve in 1999 originally to oppose the death penalty, but after 2001 it had branched out into torture, illicit detention and…
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Break Up Google
It’s easy to say “Break up Big Tech companies!” Depending how politics unfold, the thing might become possible, but figuring out the details will be hard. I spent the last sixteen years of my life working for Big Tech and have educated opinions on the subject. Today: Why and how we should break up Google.
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Maybe we shouldn't want a fully decentralized web
Why I have stopped working with IPFS and the distributed web
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Stop Watching the News (2019)
Want someone else to think for you? Watch the news. Want to be distracted? Watch the news. Want something to get mad about? Watch the news. A recent passage in The Daily Stoic discussed the negative impact of hearing bad news – something like a tsunami destroying a village, or a terroris
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Why Is 1 World Trade Center Missing from Spider-Man?
Like many people across the world, I’m using my quarantine effectively: by catching up on all the video games I wasn’t able to play while traveling. The game at the top of my list? Spider-Man, which was widely recognized as one of the top games of 2018. The game is features an open-world, which means you can travel…
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Visa, Plaid, networks, and jobs
The history of credit cards helps explain why Plaid is valuable to Visa, and how Visa can make it significantly better.
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Lessons from the Gnome Patent Troll Incident
First, for all the lawyers who are eager to see the Settlement Agreement, here it is . The reason I can do this is that I’ve released software under an OSI approved licence, so I’m covered by the Releases and thus entitled to a copy of the agreement under section 10, but I’m not a party to any of the Covenants so I’m…
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Sales tax creates more unnecessary pain than value added tax
Explains through a model of selling coconuts while value added taxes distort the economy less than sales taxes.
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The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon
I'm sure you have already heard about Mastodon, typically marketed as a Twitter alternative. I will try to convince you that the word alternative doesn't mean here what you think it means, and why you may be using Mastodon wrong if you find it bori