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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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It's Been a Year and Georgia.gov Continues to Be Hacked
Illegal drug transactions facilitated through Georgia's employee portal
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The Soul of a Pedicab Driver
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver, by Carl Etnier.
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Icelandic Pirate Party enters parliament
The Icelandic Pirate Party has entered Parliament. This is clear as all the votes have been counted, with the Pirate Party at 5.1% as...
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So Far, So Good
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Being fat is a trap
This has been a difficult article to write. Partly because this is a painful topic for many, and partly because I have to be completely open and vulnerable to write about it. I only write this in the hope it can help others in similar situations. Nothing in this article is meant to judge you. If someone judges you for…
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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
Or How Competition Returns to Elite Colleges
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Linux's GPLv2 licence is routinely violated (2015)
The Linux kernel is licenced under the GPLv2. There are several notable things about this:
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The Hyperloop was always a scam
It's time to be honest about Musk's vacuum tube to nowhere
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If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine. But as you can see around 7/7 on that…
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We don’t trade with ants
When discussing advanced AI, sometimes the following exchanges happens: “Perhaps advanced AI won’t kill us. Perhaps it will trade with us” “We don’t trade with ants” I think it’s interesting to get clear on exactly why we don’t trade with ants, and whether it is relevant to the AI situation. When a person says “we…
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No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons . Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War…
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Less human AI agents, please
Nial – Knowledge work and artificial intelligence.
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Do we need copyright? (2012)
The concept of property is a social construction. Animals, such as cats, can own a piece of food, or a territory, but only as long as they are able to personally maintain a credible threat of violence. And animals can only defend concrete, physical properties, such as an area, a dead bird or a tree. … Continue reading…
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World Cup Daily, Day 25
They just don't care. Qatari World Cup organizers don't even hide their apathy over migrant worker deaths, including the most recent one.
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Chatbots are not the future
Unfortunately for the countless hapless people I've talked to in the past few months, this was inexorable. Ever since ChatGPT exploded in popularity, my inner designer has been bursting at the seams.
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Interslavic Language
Introduction to Interslavic — Vvod v medžuslovjansky jeazy — Ввод в меджусловјански језык
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On Recent Controversial Events
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
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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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Let’s fix up Notre Dame with concrete and steel, but let the sun shine into it
So, here’s a story. On 15 April 2019, when the roofspace over the crossing of Paris Cathedral caught fire, I was in a pub in east London having a burger. My initial reaction was not one of an…
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Snowden's Dead Man's Switch
Edward Snowden has set up a dead man’s switch. He’s distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him. Dead man’s switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if…
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GitHub Spam
Spam on GitHub is getting out of control and affecting 10,000's of users daily. GitHub is seemly doing nothing about it, here is the proof.