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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 72 posts.
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Edward O. Wilson: Marx was right, he had the wrong species
Among many other things, Edward Wilson is a myrmecologist and two times Pulitzer-prize winner. There is a picture taken by him of an ant holding between its mandibles a banner with the words: 'Onward Sociobiolo�gy!'. Following the publication in 1975 of his book Sociobi�ology, the New Synthesis , he became both to…
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I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers—and televisions and iPods and everything else—to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your…
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Bank Robber Recruits Accomplices With Fake Job Ad on Craigslist
Now this is clever: “I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” said Mike, who saw a Craigslist ad last week looking for workers for a road maintenance project in Monroe. He said he inquired and was e-mailed back with instructions to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe at 11 a.m…
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A bot that allows you to say only original content
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the c…
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Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
Update, 2017-09-25 Hi! This essay is undergoing a long-overdue rewrite. In the meantime, consider my 2015 follow-up essay, Obergefell v. Hodges: the database engineering perspective....
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Hacking your food supply
A perennial problem for my wife and I run into while bootstrapping our business is the lack of time. It seems like the daily grind of cooking, cleaning and shopping tends to eat up most of our available time that we have.
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Grad School Enrollment vs. Unemployment Rate
Link to Piled Higher and Deeper
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Hacking Education
I spent a lot of time on this blog in the past month exhorting everyone to give teaching tools to the neediest public schools. I did that because education is possibly the most important thing we can do for our world and our children. But I also believe the the public school system in this […]
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Guessing the Teacher's Password
When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, so…
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Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service
Update 3 : Please see my follow-up post about Twitter's response. I started using Twitter in March 2007, just before their SXSW explosion. Not surprisingly, I instantly became addicted and since then have used the service for everything from personal to professional. Overall, Twitter is a g
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Schneier reviews: Here Comes Everybody
In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don’t people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market’s transaction…
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Eliezer Yudkowsky: That Alien Message
Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale). Potential Einsteins are o…
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xkcd endorses Obama
Okay, politics time. I’m a political junkie, but I’ve largely kept that out of xkcd (other than occasional cracks about science and net-related issues). So this will be a one-time thing…
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