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The high modernism of social media companies
A Revealing Memo A couple weeks ago, BuzzFeed leaked a memo written by Facebook VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in the summer of 2016. It contained ... Read more
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
3722
Apple's amusingly round reuse figures
If you take a look at Apple's Environment page you might well be impressed by the amount of reuse Apple is getting by taking back devices....
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Culturally transmitted skills and values
Three major tools that companies have to influence behavior are incentives, process, and culture. People often mean different things when talking about these, so I'll provide an example of each so we're on the same page (if you think that I should be using a different word for the concept, feel free to mentally…
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On Citizenship in open-source software development
How GitHub can revolutionize the field simply by empowering the users inside the repositories they contribute.
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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)
There is such a thing as a free lunch
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Why American Construction Costs Are So High
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
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I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
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Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest
A proposal to end exclusionary zoning would allow for 100,000 more homes in Berkeley's neighborhoods.
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USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets
Since 2014, the US Dept. of Agriculture has a record of "burying" the science
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Why Do DMT Users See Insects from a Parallel Universe?
The molecule DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. The transition from our world to theirs occurs with no cessation of consciousness or…
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The Deal That Makes No Sense
Early this morning Microsoft acquired Nokia for €3.79 billion (plus €1.65 billion for patents). It is a deal that makes no sense. While industry observers love to pontificate about mergers and acqu…
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The Placeholder Girlfriend
It became real when I saw the list. When I saw the rubric.
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Tor is not just for anonymity (2022)
Tech, Pets, and Vettes
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The Slack Social Network
Slack lost to Microsoft head-to-head, but has smartly shifted to a horizontal strategy that the vertically-oriented Microsoft can’t match.
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The collective insanity of the publishing industry
Unless you're a writer, I imagine you haven't been paying quite as close attention to the publishing industry and all its weirdness as I have, and that's a shame, because it's been really entertaining. Actually, entertaining isn't the right word. It's been insane, but the kind of insane that's unreasonably fun to…
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On Depression and Founders
Depression is real in founders. Please be careful.
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Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos
OR: The Great Switcheroo
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Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? (2017)
In this post, you'll find out more on the legal aspect of web scraping and crawling, and what possible consequences you might face.
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Greenwald: Yesterday Journalists Spread a Significant Lie All over Twitter
Eager to obtain vindication for the pre-election falsehood they spread about the Hunter Biden story, journalists falsely claim that the CIA blamed Russia for it.
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RIP botsin.space
There's no easy way to put it, so here goes -- after a lot of consideration, I've made the hard (frankly, painful) decision to shut down botsin.space. TLDR: here's the plan:
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Snowden Meets the IETF
Last night, we had a screening of CITIZENFOUR at the IETF meeting in Prague, and about 170 people showed up to see the movie about Edward Snowden’s relevations — information that led the IETF to declare such pervasive monitoring as an attack on the Internet itself.
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The US Intelligence Community has a Third Leaker
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
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How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
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The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…