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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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The invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election – ranked
It’s been a long, confusing, exhausting federal election season. We’re all tired. But put aside your worries, fellow citizens; it’s time for the invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal …
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I finally understand methane lifetimes
How to arrive at a number you can trust
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LLMs Are Complicated Now
Back in 2022 and 2023 there were two big branches of machine learning happening at Meta1. The LLM work that led to Llama was a clean, smooth stack of repeated Transformer modules; the recommendatio…
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I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract
"It was a complete overreaction on their part to not only fire everyone who was and wasn't involved, but then also threaten everyone else in the company who would dare think to stand up against this...it feels like a very fascist environment."
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Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality?
Originally published: November 2021 One of the most polarizing topics today is wealth inequality. I think a better description is to refer to it as wealth concentration. Nobody should expect wealth to be equal in a society, but when wealth becomes extremely concentrated (way more unequal than usual), it’s often a sign…
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Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work
Imagine you had a dog. You got the dog when it was young, trained and raised it. This animal was a part of your family and you gave it little collars and cute little clothes with your family name on it. The dog came to special events and soon thought
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Banks, QE, and Money-Printing
Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…
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Is this the new cyber normal?
A week of cyber incidents one after another – is this what every week is going to look like and what can we do about it?
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Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
Trying to obfuscate the web is a bad, pointless idea
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Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology
This essay is telescopic . It can shrink or expand, depending on how much attention you are willing to give. This is the original version (3344 words). Show other sizes .
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Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View
Whistleblower disclosures and investigative reporting have revealed a lot about what was happening—and what was known—inside Meta during the lead-up to the genocide in Myanmar, including a connection to a global wave of fake-page networks devoted to manipulation and political misinformation.
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If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging
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What Android is
What happened was, for our recent South American tour I wanted an Android architecture overview graphic. I ran across, among the Android SDK documentation, a page entitled What is Android? , and it’s perfectly OK. Except for, I really disliked the picture — on purely aesthetic grounds, just not my kind of lettering…
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Aaron Swartz on illness and depression
I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping up with Bubble City. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks lying in bed and drinking fluids. (With occasional breaks to play Rock Band, much to the annoyance of my neighbors.) Once again, I’ve been sick — this time, with four different illnesses.
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Stop Reading News (2013)
Discover why constant news consumption makes us less informed and how to break free from information overload to think more clearly.