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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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Mental Mountains
I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better. He begins: UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is dr…
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Is Europe just not good at innovating?
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Feedback is very welcome on bert@hubertnet.nl. I’d also like to thank the many proofreaders, but all mistakes remain mine! In the world of (high) technology, Europe is exceptionally weak at innovating. There are many ways to explain how this…
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Tech Workers' Values
For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives. As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect...
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What's wrong with social science and how to fix it
Replication, citations, power, incentives, and more.
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The candy stores of Oxford Street
» email me » follow me on twitter » follow the blog on twitter » follow the blog on Bluesky » follow the blog on RSS
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Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline
Microsoft is increasingly left only with customers whose priority is price.
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Sovereign writers and Substack
Substack is at the center of media controversy, most of which misses the point that sovereign writers — not Substack — are in control.
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Dear American Website Owner
Jan Rychter: Tech Consulting, Product Development, Data Science.
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Pseudonymity as a Trivial Concession to Genius
Update (6/24): For further thoughts and context about this unfolding saga, see this excellent piece by Tom Chivers (author of The AI Does Not Hate You, so far the only book about the rationalist co…
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Fire Mark Zuckerberg
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at. Click to read DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at, by Ed Zitron, a Substack publication.
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What would open sourcing the Twitter algorithm actually look like?
What would “open sourcing the Twitter algorithm” actually look like? In Part 1 of this series, we focus on understanding how Twitter’s algorithmic feed works under the hood.
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The Unsustainability of Moore's Law
Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles.
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Bye Bye Gmail
TLDR: Please remove @gmail.com as my primary email address and substitute removed . I will try to respond to email sent to @gmail.com but no guarantees.
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The uncanny absence of nihilism
Nihilism, like botulism, is not an ideology or conceptual system. It is a stance: an emotionally-charged way of being.
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The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
An S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
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The End of ProTube 2
I am very sad to announce that ProTube was removed from the App Store by Apple on September 1, 2017. This comes after multiple requests and threats by YouTube which ultimately led Apple to suddenly pulling the app from the App Store. ProTube and many other 3rd party YouTube apps on the App Store have been targeted by…
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Overconsumption is a spiritual problem
Overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a money problem. Lessons about desire from "Spirited Away".
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When hard books disappear
[Translations: Japanese] Hard books are on their way to extinction. Biologists maintain a concept call a “type specimen.” Every species of living organism has many individuals of noticeable variety. There are millions of Robins in America, for instance, all of … Continue reading →
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Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores
A counterintuitive conclusion
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Paperbacks and TikTok
In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 ... Read more
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Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception
There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.
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ChatGPT has trouble giving an answer before explaining its reasoning
ChatGPT is a fancy auto-complete : what it does is finding the most likely continuation of text for the text it has already printed out (or as a reply for the prompt, when it is starting printing stuff out), according to the large corpus of text it has been trained with.
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Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History
The actions taken by Big Tech have a resonance that goes beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics. Even if they were right, they will still push the world to Internet 3.0.