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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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Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
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Guys what is wrong with ACATS
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
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Where the Digital Sidewalk Ends
VIO77 menyajikan rincian info bocoran game online terlengkap, panduan pola gacor, dan update RTP live terakurat untuk mempermudah jalan Anda meraih maxwin hari ini.
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AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust
AI-generated work can look finished without being understood. That uncertainty erodes trust, slows reviews, and leaves colleagues doing the missing work.
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The Locust Economy
Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here's how it happened. I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon.…
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Life is wasting my time
Lately I've been struggling with a constant feeling that there is 'something else' I am supposed to be doing. If I wasn't doing this, I'd be doing something awesome.
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2024's public domain is a banger
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
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Happy Little Words – Analyzing the Bob Ross Twitch Chat
In late October the video game streaming site Twitch.tv launched "Twitch Creative" , essentially giving people permission to stream non-video game related creative content on the site. To celebrate the launch they streamed all 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross in a giant marathon.
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An age-old question
Back to: Let's put the future behind us | Forward to: On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
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Those correction notices, in full
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.
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The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker (1985)
Harry Truman was President and Sputnik was a word that only Russian language experts knew when Doug Engelbart first thought about displaying words and images on radar screens, storing them in computers, and manipulating them with levers and buttons and keyboards. For over thirty years, Engelbart has been trying to…
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Thoughts about Twitter
nolan caudill's internet house
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Linux – The beginning of the end?
Important article slash rant about the recent story involving Linus Torvalds and his behavior in the Linux kernel development circles, the subsequent apology, the fallout, and the disturbing implications and ramifications of the whole affair on the long-term survival of Linux as a whole
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Has the lead-crime hypothesis been debunked?
A couple of months ago a new paper was released that examined the lead-crime hypothesis. Its conclusion is that there's little evidence for an association, and if there is one it's pretty small. I haven't commented on it, but not because of its negative conclusion. It's because the paper is a meta-analysis. I'm fairly…
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There are too many video games
Let's marinate in some hard truths. Dissect what is in front of our eyes.
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The Importance of India
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here. “Quantity has a quality of its own”–Attribution contested A significant factor in the power of states throughout history has been sheer numbers. Spain was able to control an overseas empire to a significantly greater degree than Portugal…
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The Peking Duck Exemption
Most food safety regulations say that Peking duck should be illegal. But it's not, so what gives?
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Greece’s Proposals to End the Crisis
The only antidote to propaganda and malicious ‘leaks’ is transparency. After so much disinformation on my presentation at the Eurogroup of the Greek government’s position, the only response is to post the precise words uttered within. Read them and judge for yourselves whether the Greek government’s proposals…
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Anger, Anxiety and Agency
Who is the AI villain we should be angry at?
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The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis
As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internet
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Mortgages are a manufactured product (2022)
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
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People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads
At least, not according to Facebook data
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The dark side of account bans
I recently lost my Facebook account for two months, and was significantly cut off from certain aspects of society during that time. This is the dark side of account bans.
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What Is Life? (2019)
What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it…