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How does the US use water?
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 666 posts.
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If my kids excel, will they move away?
I grew up on a farm outside of a rural town about an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. Like many small towns in America, my town knows “brain drain” – all of my friends from high school who went to college (~30% of my class) now live elsewhere, although most are pretty close by (e.g., several live in the suburbs of…
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American Disruption
A new take on Trump’s tariffs, including using a disruption lens to understand the U.S.’s manufacturing problem, and why a better plan would leverage demand, not kill it.
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Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks
In January, Distributed Denial of Secrets published over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias, including American Patriots Three Percent (APIIII) and the Oath Keepers. The files were obtained by John Williams, a wilderness survival trainer who spent years deep undercover…
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Are you stuck in movie logic?
Consider just saying what the problem is
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The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program
The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python …
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Our phones are killing our ability to feel sexy (2024)
Eros, desire, instinct, eternity
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The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
Content is infinite and free now. Trust isn't. We're abandoning digital channels entirely because we can't tell what's real anymore.
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Mozilla's latest quagmire
Defending Mozilla’s inclusion of AI features and tooling in Firefox misses the point, and only threatens to isolate them further.
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Introduction to GrapheneOS
In this blog post, you will learn about the security oriented smartphone operating system GrapheneOS
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Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores
The US has become a hostile and authoritarian state to foreign scientists and is choosing ideology over science.
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Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines
The challenge The authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely w…
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Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
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A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes
Can Hollywood's stamp of artistic excellence still be trusted?
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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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The collapse of the econ PhD job market
What is an Economics PhD worth in 2025?
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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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How can I influence others without manipulating them?
Learn practical ways to influence others ethically using five respectful approaches that build trust, commitment and genuine buy-in.
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Celebrating the timeless allure of Tintin's aesthetics
The Adventures of Tintin officially entered the public domain in 2025. We now all own the alluring aesthetics of this timeless classic.
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An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens
Since I reside in a Five Eyes country (Australia) and have publicly presented four cases I led on China’s APT41 attacking organisations in ASEAN , particularly concerning China’s cyber and political strategies, I was curious to explore what China publishes about Five Eyes operations. This led me down a rabbit hole of…
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AI slop, suspicion, and writing back
On developing an involuntary reflex for spotting AI slop
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Discovering the indieweb with calm tech
Blog Quest and StreetPass help you discover the independent web
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AI is making us work more
How tools that were supposed to free us up to find meaning work have exacerbated the rat race.
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Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy
Financial literacy without real-world money experience is as ineffective as teaching swimming with PowerPoint slides. A critical look at classroom finance education.
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An official atlas of North Korea
A North Korean atlas that shows the world from the perspective of one of the most isolated countries on the planet.
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The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
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The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008)
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...
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Why the open social web matters now
The needs are real – and you have so much power.