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Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
We have public schools for a reason.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 598 posts.
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Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance
The European Commission wants to turn digital communication apps, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, TikTok and X, into mass surveillance tools so that digital communications of all EU citizens, including their live conversations, photos and videos, can be automatically scanned for criminal offences.[1] Even of…
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Honestly, It's Probably the Phones
The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.
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Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records
"Only in Los Angeles" has never rung more true
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The greatest risk of AI is from the people who control it, not the tech itself
The history of technology suggests that the greatest risks come not from the tech, but from the people who control it
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I skipped to the ending
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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The Windows 11 Trash Party
Thomas Bandt was setting up a new computer for his kid, and it gave him the opportunity to really look at what Windows has become over the years. Here's what was showing by default in the Start menu: First, there was news about a mass shooting that had occurred
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Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
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Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
As I’ve posted before and many others have noted , there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.
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Web scraping for me, but not for thee
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to...
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Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…
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I wish GPT4 had never happened
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Killing Community
This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrates how the…
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AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search
We use Notion for the bulk of our knowledge management at CodePen. I have no use for an AI that can write for me.
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My Caste
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
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The Bond villain compliance strategy
Jurisdictional gamesmanship is a common strategy for crypto businesses. Here is how it worked out for Binance and its CEO. Spoiler: poorly.
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We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the …
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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief
Disguising self-interest as virtue
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I don't want streaming music, I just want to stream my music
I don't want your streaming music service, I just want the music I've collected and care about available to stream.
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The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation
Should AI systems treat different demographic groups unequally?
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Google Groups has been left to die
Where should the formal methods community move?
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BBC gives up on Threads, sticks with Mastodon
So numerous brands are giving up on Threads by Instagram, allegedly due to lack of engagement (ironically, most of them are still using...
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Cops still take more stuff from people than burglars do (2021)
Let’s get one thing out of the way: it’s not normal to stuff $100,000 in cash into a suitcase and then check said suitcase on to a domestic flight.
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I face investigation for terrorism
My phone is not being returned to me by police as, astonishingly, I am now formally under investigation for terrorism. Whether this relates to support for Palestine or for Wikileaks has currently not been made clear. What follows is, unspun and unvarnished, my account of my interview under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism…
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Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
A group of prominent scientists spread misinformation about COVID's origins. Mainstream journalists missed the story.
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My rude-ass car
I need to vent about the impolite piece of yet-to-become e-waste on wheels that is my rude-ass car . You've heard versions of this story before, nothing is particularly novel in the shock department, enshittification is everywhere, etcetera... but I need the catharsis.