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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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Woo for Its Own Sake
Software development is a funny profession. It covers people who do stuff ranging from register twiddling in device drivers and OS guts, to people who serve web content, to “big data” s…
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John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
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Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels
To: Oversight Board Good day, My name is Igor Petrov, I am an independent historian. The list of my publications, including those for Cambridge University Press, is available at https://independent.academia.edu/IgorPetrov40 On August 6, 2021, whilst conducting archival research and working with…
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Critical Thinking Isn't Just a Process
Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying
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Turkey's Financial Crisis
Earlier this week, Mohamed El-Erian was lost for words.
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“Raiders of the Lost Ark” Story Conference Transcript (1978)
G We’ll just talk general ideas, what the concept of it was. Then I’ll get down to going specifically through the story. Then we will actually get to where we can start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick…
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Why admitting Covid is Airborne is so hard
Evidence for airborne spread of Covid-19 is strong, but authorities underemphasize airborne protections. The curious history of infectious disease reveals how this anti-airborne bias emerged.
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Facebook shouldn’t be in charge of how you use Facebook
Unfollow Everything and the need for (good) tech regulation.
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Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
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Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. — Paul Graham, What You Can’t Sa…
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Valid Signal privacy issues shrugged off while patches quietly rolled out
kelly kaoudis: application security, hacking, software engineering blog
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Farmers always worked from home
Farmers effectively work from home, and in the past majority of the population was farming. What can they teach us about Work-Life Balance?
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Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes
Econ gives us an example of when and why this happens.
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Decentralised content moderation
With Donald Trump suspended from Twitter and Facebook, and Parler kicked off AWS, there is renewed discussion about what sort of speech is acceptable online, and how it should be enforced. Let me say up front that I believe that these bans were justified. However, they do raise questions that need to be discussed…
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Master List of Logical Fallacies (2018)
Fallacies are fake or deceptive arguments, "junk cognition," that is, arguments that seem irrefutable but prove nothing. Fallacies often seem superficially sound and they far too often retain immense persuasive power even after being clearly exposed as false. Like epidemics, fallacies sometimes "burn through" entire…
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There are infinite worlds to explore
There are infinite worlds to explore.
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Walking the World: Bucharest
A city of the grandiose, filled with the humble
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The longest train journey in the world in 2021
IMPORTANT : this blog post is correct as of 15 December 2021, and all the text below is unchanged since then. At that time two borders - Russia to China, and China to Laos - could not be crossed due to COVID. The outbreak of war in Ukraine has also meant that trains
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51 Star Flag (2011)
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
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The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should…
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