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A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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What Amazon's ebook strategy really means
It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.
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Seeing the Smoke
Information on the coronavirus is widely available, and it doesn’t look positive. So why is everyone waiting for permission to do something about it?
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Anti-Personnel Computing (2023)
Neologisms for the current computing era.
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The Glass Famine
Spies, war, industrial subterfuge and secret recipes. And it all really happened. Honestly, what more could you ask for?
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The Cosmetic Class
What happens when a society with a penchant for the cosmetic meets a medium dominated by it? “The medium is the message.” Or so goes the famous saying from media scholar Marshall McLuhan, widely re…
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How Block Blast harvests its players for ad money
Rules downloaded from their server decide your pieces, your score and your ads. One waits for an expensive ad, then asks for a hand you can’t place.
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AAAS Blocking Access to the Scientific Literature When They Say It Is “Free”
A blog about microbiology, genomics and metagenomics, sequencing, evolution, ecology, and open science.
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Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi (Chancellor of UC Davis)
18 November 2011 Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi Linda P.B. Katehi, I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in th…
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Deterministic thinking: a problem in how we think, not just in how we act
– Basketball Stats: Don’t model the probability of win, model the expected score differential.
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Every fucking website: 2026 edition
Every AI-generated landing page, all at once, labelling itself as it goes.
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Against Murderism
[Content warning: discussion of racism. Comments are turned off due to bad experience with the comments on this kind of material.] I. A set of questions, hopefully confusing: Alice is a white stay-…
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Rat Park drug experiment cartoon
Comic about a classic experiment into drug addiction science: Rat Park. Would rats take drugs if given a stimulating environment and company?
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Entitlement issues (2009)
I am home. My dog is happy to see me. The world is a good place and I am behind on work because American Airlines doesn't have proper power ...
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Stuxnet was embarrassing, not amazing (2011)
As the New York Times posts yet another breathless story about Stuxnet, I’m surprised that no one has pointed out its obvious deficiencies. Everyone seems to be hyperventilating about its pur…
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San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?
I lived in New York City for 8 years and never had anything major stolen. In San Francisco, it took 2 weeks…
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I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
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How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's
The lost art of the "Somers System" of land valuation
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Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)
Paper presented at the 14 th Rhodes Forum: Dialogue of Civilisations Research Institute, Panel 2: Economic Alternatives when Conventional Models Fail, Rhodos, Greece, on 1 October 2016
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Cottagecore Programmers
Every programmer I know has at some point longingly expressed how “[they] want to work with [their] hands”. Some say they wish they were a carpenter, some want to be in the fields on a farm, some want to raise chickens, or milk cows. It is however inevitable that I either hear someone say it or agree with it at some…
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United Airlines Threatens to Engage Collections for Passengers Who Skip Segments
United reportedly has an effort to go after customers specifically that utilize Skiplagged to fly hidden city itineraries on the airline. In one case they're demanding payment of over $3000 and threatening to shut down the member's frequent flyer account and ban then from the airline. They are also threatening to send…
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I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet
I live in Brazil. Brazil is a developing country. It is definitely not a rich country, but it is definitely not among the poorest either. We are placed on 84th in human development index rankings. You will find Brazil similarly in the middle of other rankings like per-capita income, education or life expectancy. There…
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