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2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?
It finally happened!
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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How should net metering affect your electric bill?
And lies cause waste
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Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
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A Critique of the Open Letter Calling for the Removal of RMS
On March 21, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) announced that he is on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors again after having resigned in September 2019. Two days later, an open letter condemning RMS as misogynist, ableist, transphobic, intolerant, bigoted, hateful, and dangerous was published. The letter…
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The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
All my professional life, I have been driven by the conviction that the unique freedom of political cartooning entails a great sense of responsibility. But something happened...
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Worldcoin: A solution in search of its problem
Worldcoin doesn't seem to know what problem it's trying to solve, but they want to scan your eyeballs anyway.
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Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
The long-time host of PBS NewsHour Jim Lehrer died this week at the age of 85. In this age of news as entertainment and opinion as news, Lehrer seems like one o
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A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes
Can Hollywood's stamp of artistic excellence still be trusted?
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Pop culture has become an oligopoly
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
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Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236
How a series of errors on the ground and in the air caused a fully loaded passenger jet to run out of fuel in the mid-Atlantic.
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What on earth are Google thinking? (re: Binggate)
By now you’ve no doubt smelled the shitstorm surrounding Google’s allegation that Bing are ‘cheating’ and copying Google’s search results. If not, in brief, Google spotted that Bing sometimes includes results that seemed to be copied from Google, so Google set up a honeypot – they made some made up words like…
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Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case
It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn't have to fear competitors.
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EU Scolds Visa et al. For Killing WikiLeaks Donations, Initiates Regulation
Today, the European Parliament ordered new legislation to regulate credit card companies' ability to refuse service. This regulation follows the unilateral and rightless cutoff...
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EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption
This week, the European Parliament's negotiators reached a broad majority agreement on a common position concerning the controversial EU chat control bill. The Commission’s bill proposes bulk scanning and reporting of private messages for allegedly suspicious content by using error-prone algorithms,
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John McCarthy: The Robot and the Baby
THE ROBOT AND THE BABY
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The collapse of the econ PhD job market
What is an Economics PhD worth in 2025?
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Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists
An unhinged polemic
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When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
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Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
NOTE: This post is a slightly longer version of a piece I recently published on The Federalist. Their editor asked me to cut some passages because it was a bit long, but I figured that readers of my blog would…
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Does that use a lot of energy?
This tool was designed to get a sense of the differences in energy consumption between different products. It's often difficult to understand whether activities matter a lot or very little for our overall energy consumption.
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How the US Government will Smear, Slight Whistleblower Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden said that he stepped forward because he came to realize that the US government is engaged in invasions of Americans' privacy on a vast and unprecedented scale, and was hiding its int...