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Columbo: an origin story (2018)
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first airing of Prescription: Miurder, here’s a little bit about the origins of the Columbo character – and the actors who played him before …
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 629 posts.
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Clubhouse’s Inevitability
Clubhouse will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video.
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Chilling Effects
In what sense do 10% of people die of the cold? Also, why are heat-related deaths most common in Greenland?
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Please support Web Monetization if you want less ads on the web
Why everyone should use web monetization to help lower the amount of ads on the web
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Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?
YouTube's decision to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein raises serious questions, both about the First Amendment and regulatory capture
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Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
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Apple wants to redefine what it means to violate your privacy. We mustn’t let it
Violation of privacy by proxy is still violation of privacy.
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Facebook’s Widely Viewed Content Report is strange
According to new data, the most popular post on Facebook is a business that sells golfing dates with former Green Bay Packers players. What?!
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How many people have Q Clearance?
Ever wonder how many people currently have the enigmatic Q Clearance, the required security clearance for access to nuclear secrets? Well, I found out.
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Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
Texts on this and that.
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Taxes Are for the Little People
If you wanna do crimes, make them incredibly complicated and technical. Like the hustlers that came into the bookstore I worked at and spun these long-ass stories about why they needed money for a Greyhound ticket home.
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If AT&T Had Managed the Phone Business Like Google
Imagine a Silicon Valley strategy implemented with the United States phone system 100 years ago. It's not a pretty picture.
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The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think
The multi-skin toned handshake emoji reveals that it is more than a routine gesture
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Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor (2011)
September 2011 Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich. —Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera , 22 Feb. 2011 It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic p
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Excess Deaths in 2020
Update Updated on April 29th, 2021. The CDC continues to update its counts of deaths by cause for 2020 as data comes in from the jurisdictions that report to it. The data are by now fairly complete, though there are still significant gaps in several states due to delayed reporting. North Carolina, in particular, has…
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The sea people: Alexander the Great trod in the footsteps of forgotten Greeks
Alexander the Great tread in the footsteps of forgotten Greeks
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Living Like It's 99, No Social Media, No Smartphone
I’ve now lived without social media and without a smartphone for the past 3 years. And I’m still alive. A lot of people have asked me how I made it. So I wrote an article about it. The why, the how, and the now.
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The home computer as a cultural object is physically vanishing (2007)
The home computer presents itself through several interfaces, some in software, some in hardware. While it is mostly assumed that these interfaces’ goals are to expose the computing capabilities of the system to its user, obviously interfaces are at the same time responsible for transporting the image of the machine.
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Facebook Recruiter Correspondence
A brief exchange with a Facebook recruiter in the summer of 2020
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How you can get banned from Facebook permanently
Contact Facebook customer service for your customer service needs. Reach out via phone, email, or social media.
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We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages (2020)
“If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?”
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Moral lessons from free software and GNU Emacs
Video blog on the five lessons I learnt in my life as a computer user, including when I switched to free software and GNU Emacs.
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Is content moderation a dead end?
Can we get content moderation to work, or is it as much of a dead end as virus scanning? Do we need to change the whole model of social instead?