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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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Benjamin Button Reviews macOS
Benjamin Button Reviews macOS | exotext
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Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)
Rich countries consume much higher quantities via higher intensity/tech. It's NOT high and rising: wages, profits, administration, encounters, etc. Income well explains American behavior here too.
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On the Graying of Gnome
The GNOME project turned 23 this year, and despite equally persistent rumors to the contrary, it's still alive and kicking. Just how alive, though?
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Thoughts on the Durov Arrest
Today we learn that Pavel Durov, founder of the popular messaging app Telegram, has been arrested as his private jet landed in France. Early indications are that the arrest stems from Telegram̵…
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There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
I used to work next to the center for nanotechnology. The first indication I had that there was something wrong with the discipline of “nanotechnology” is I noticed that the people who …
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Air Marshals Will Refuse Orders to Go to the Border, Prefer First Class Cabins
Armed federal officers publicly threatening to defy orders from the President seems like it’s getting insufficient attention. The Biden administration largely continuing Trump’s border policies (he’s building the wall!) seems under-covered as well. The claim about vulnerable flights as a result is absurd.
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Why high fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in US
Once in a while I come across an animated debate on health benefits of sugar vs. high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It is enzymatically produced mixture of glucose and fructose that approximately matches the chemical composition of sucrose, aka sugar. It is not this debate that is my concern; rather,…
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“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”
Question for Quote Investigator: I was looking through a collection of woefully inaccurate pronouncements delivered by experts, and I saw a remark attributed to Ken Olsen, a prominent computer industry pioneer who founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which built minicomputers. DEC was perfectly positioned…
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The myth of the myth of the lone genius
The Myth of the Lone Genius is a bullshit cliche and we would do well to stop parroting it to young people like it is some deep insight into the nature of innovation.
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Before brogramming, table flipping, and beyond
Technowoman, one woman and her travels through a career in technology
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Why the Government Isn't a Bigger Version of a Startup
This article previously appeared in War On The Rocks There was a time when much of U.S. academia was engaged in weapon systems research for the Defense Department and intelligence community. Some o…
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Web3 is not Decentralisation – it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge
People are right to be concerned about the centralisation of power on the Web — but we embrace blockchain at our peril
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Online censorship's institutional power
The converging interests of technocrats, media, and academia, as seen through the lens of the world's most deplatformed US-legal website.
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The Great Flattening
Apple’s iPad ad might not have been good for Apple, but it was a profound encapsulation of what has happened on the Internet; the question is what it leads to next.
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A Word on Omarchy
An in-depth look at the currently trending Arch Linux configuration that is Omarchy.
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The End of Safe Harbor and a Scary Path Forward
Some in detail analysis about what the end of safe harbor means for small companies, especially in Europe.
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Why Does Claude Speak Byzantine Music Notation?
A Caesar cipher is a reasonable transformation for a transformer to learn in its weights, given that a specific cipher offset occurs often enough in its training data. There will be some hidden representation of the input tokens' spelling, and this representation could be used to shift letters onto other letters in…
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The next century of computing
80 Brief Predictions for the Future
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Bombs vs. Bugs
I’ll be taking some time in the next months to talk about the newly hostile-by-default nature of technology, and how I deal with it.
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Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !