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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
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Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings
What exists is a matter of public opinion
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A Rant About “Technology” (2005)
Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work
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What's in those mysterious cabinets?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Silicon Valley Is Filled With Liars
Have you been caught telling one of these lies?
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How the design of Disney parks affects our perspective (2020)
The layout of the Disney parks may not be something you think about except for at the end of the day when your feet are aching and sitting feels like the best ride ever. Or when you're hiking around the Epcot World Showcase in the blazing sun and afternoon heat.
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Gmail will call the cops on you based on the content of your emails
Correction: An earlier draft of this story misstated a technical detail; Mark didn’t email his photo to his doctor; rather, he took the photo with his phone and the image was automatically synched to his Google Photos account, triggering a scan .
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YouTube should give users a way of knowing if a video has been altered
It was the day of the Samsung Fold launch, and I had watched a few videos from big-name tech channels on YouTube to quickly get up to speed.
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Telescope Ranchers
Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditio
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Enforcement by Software
At my university, one of our internal software systems allows a professor to submit a revision to a course. The professor might change the content or the objectives of the course. In a university, professors have extensive freedom regarding course content. As long as you reasonably meet the course objectives, you can…
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Apple is professional, the web is amateur
It’s common knowledge that Apple doesn’t get the web in general and social in particular. I’ve been thinking a lot about the social part recently and I think Apple’s failure to execute there can shed some light on their failure with the web in general.
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Paul Graham Is Still Asking to Be Eaten
An Obviously Critical Response to “Economic Inequality” by Paul Graham
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AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC
Over the past two years I’ve quietly rebuilt major parts of the OldNYC photo viewer . The result: 10,000 additional historic photos on the map , more accurate locations, and a site that’s cheaper and easier to run—thanks to modern AI tools and the OpenStreetMap ecosystem.
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Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
A day after my previous post, and things have been happening. SHORT TERM: First, I asked for people to send money if they couldn’t help any other way, and people have. This took away any conc…
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Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done
Groucho Marx? Fred Waring? Ed Gardner? Goodman Ace? Jane Ace? Fred Allen? Ernie Kovacs? Deane Binder? Anonymous?
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Lord Camden on NSA Surveillance
I’m doing a deep dive into the pre-history of the Fourth Amendment, and am continuously amazed at how perfectly the condemnations of the “general warrants” that incensed the Framers apply to the programmatic authority granted the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act. The legal challenge to that statute is currently hung…
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Thought as a Technology
Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world?
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LLMs know more than what they say
... and how that provides winning evals
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Why nobody hires junior developers and what happens next
While the number of job opportunities for software developer skyrockets together with salaries all around the world, fresh grads and junior developers struggle to even get invited for the interviews. Why does it happen and can we do anything about it?
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Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands
Are GLP-1 drugs the first real threat to the hyper-processed food and alcohol industries?
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Bruce Perens: On Non-Judicical Punishment of Individuals
Non-Judicial Punishment is a key part of democracy and free-market capitalism, and highly problematical, at the same time.
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How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
Investigating the use of LLMs in the Android FOSS community