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The Rocky Horror Coffin Clock
It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll…
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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FBI doesnt want you to know it uses NSLs to correlate identities you use online
Back in March, I parsed the declaration Nicholas Merrill submitted in his bid to reveal the contents of what he was asked to turn over via an NSL back in 2004. As a reminder, here’s what FBI permitted Merrill to reveal at the beginning of this suit. And here’s Merrill’s description of what kind of […]
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Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts (2020)
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts said Richard Feynman. Feynman had a Nobel prize in physics. He was a remarquable educator: his lecture notes are still popular. He foresaw nanotechnology and quantum computing. He is credited with identifying the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There is…
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Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
Colin Campbell explains how Redwood drains every drop of capacity from used batteries before they are recycled.
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All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second
I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth ...
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Save the USPS
There are three types of infrastructure. One is visible: roads, dams and bridges. The second is invisible: broadband internet provisions and the entirety of our cellular infrastructure. Both are st…
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RMS lifestyle
I do not have a favorite food, a favorite book, a favorite song, a favorite joke, a favorite flower, or a favorite butterfly. My tastes don't work that way.
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De-googling, so far
Over the past few years, I have tried to gradually reduce or eliminate my use of Google products and services. It has been difficult to ditch Google’s products in some categories, and in some others, it has been nigh impossible. Here, I list the services I have tried to find alternatives for, discuss the ease (or lack…
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Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Very weird, isn't it?
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An Economy of Overfed Middlemen
A venture capitalist called Equal Ventures just says it straight-up, we seek to invest in monopolization.
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Smartphones Are Toys First, Tools Second
If you time-traveled to the 1960s, or even the 1980s, and tried to describe smartphones to the people you met, they wouldn’t believe you.
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A year of vibes
A personal recap of 2025 and a year of a new style of engineering.
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The Tamagotchi Cemetery
In 1996, Japanese toy designers Aki Maita and Yokoi Akihiro debuted the first ever Tamagotchi.
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Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)
Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far…
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How 30 days without social media changed my life
30 days ago, I made the decision to give up social media for a month. Well, here I am, reporting that I’m still alive and that the past month has been life changing- the most successful month of my existence.
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Fuck.com (1997)
Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.
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Understanding how bureaucracy develops
understanding how actions taken with the best of intentions can put your organization in a straightjacket
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A Lego model of financial capitalism
Unboxing the dark arts of finance
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Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
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Tiffin Tom: Fish, chips and a side of identity theft
Apart from leaking everything, there's been "no breech". Avoid Tiffin Tom.
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Japanese zoning
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
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The 1% fallacy
Here is how to make a fortune writing software: Pick a large and established software market e.g. back-up, anti-virus or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Write a new product for tha…
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