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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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Ego Death
Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.
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Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook
It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook , so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.
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The Hierarchy of Money
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
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The Hobby Computer Culture
[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of …
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The Siege of Carrie Lam
On September 26, 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam held her first listening session after seventeen weeks of protest. Her government, which had spent the summer nearly incommunicado, had settled on these encounters as a way to heal social divisions and identify the mysterious goals of a movement whose five…
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Tools for thought as cultural practices, not computational objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
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Hellbanned from Hacker News
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
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Why does Britain feel so poor?
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
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On paying for software
The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…
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Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our users can continue to access all content the…
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An Idea for the Economy that will Freak Out a lot of People
The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield . In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can. The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money. That’s a premise that should make the…
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Stanford CS enrollment increase "downright scary"
Eric Roberts just sent out a note of concern to the ACM Education Council, and he kindly allowed me to share it here as a guest post. When I read his note, I thought about my May 2009 CACM column …
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US Customs Export Control Says: I’m Screwed
Update: It looks like this problem may have been resolved by USPS, with international shipments sent May 11 or later proceeding normally. But there’s still confusion about the source of the problem, the date it was resolved, and whether it’s truly fixed. It appears it’s necessary to buy new postage to reship any…
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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
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Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards
parker higgins is an artist and activist in brooklyn, new york
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How to identify an immoral maze
Previously in sequence: Moloch Hasn’t Won, Perfect Competition, Imperfect Competition, Does Big Business Hate Your Family?, What is Life in an Immoral Maze?, Stripping Away the Protections, What is…
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JWZ: that "duct tape" silliness
301 This blog has moved to jwz.org . This post has been archived here . Please update your links. 301