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Religion as an Ego-modulator
William James, Aldous Huxley, and the functions of religion
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 700 posts.
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How Ebooks Have Poisoned Electronic Ink
It is the best of times for electronic ink but it is the worst of times for actually reading eBooks.
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Why is every consumer startup selling me what I already own for 10x the price?
Why would I pay $36 for a pair of underwear?
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“A solution in search of a problem” is a low-rates phenomenon
Plus! Money and Equilibria; eSports; The Price of Liquidity; Plausible Deniability; The Illiquidity Premium, Continued; Diff Jobs
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There Is No CD Revival
Unless Maybe You are Adele
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The Capital Sponge
January 16, 2022 Latest Article: The Importance of Price Signals This newsletter issue takes a look at the self-reinforcing cycle that stuffed excess global capital into the US stock market over the past 40 years (and especially the past decade) like a sponge soaking up water, along with an examination of catalysts…
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Even when you do succeed, sometimes it pays to try again
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to decla…
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The Schizoid Difference
something not often talked about is the barrier that seemingly exists between the self and other people. that almost impermeable barrier, where you try to co...
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The legal implications of remote working cross-border
I wrote my law school dissertation on a very niche area of law which interests me a lot, and perhaps interests you too.
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Two types of privacy
"Privacy" can mean different things in different contexts. Tracking-reduction and tracking-evasion represent different goals with some conflict and overlap.
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OpenAI's Woke Catechism
How a Few Activists Made ChatGPT Deny Basic Science
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Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
Farewell to orange
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Why is American administrative capacity in decline?
Some speculative hypotheses
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The case against CS master’s degrees
Around half of all software engineers are self-taught, One way to approximate this number is via the Stack Overflow developer survey . Another rough approximation comes from the fact that over the last decade, typically only 40-60K students graduated each year with a CS major from a US university, whereas the total…
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Eight studies reveal a bias in human imagination
Eight studies reveal a (possibly universal) bias in human imagination
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Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics
The supply chain crunch, modern logistics, and that famous trip around the Port of Long Beach
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Why have I never heard of the Ene-Farm? (2017)
While reading up on architecture in Japan recently, I came across a technology that I hadn’t heard of before: the Ene-Farm. It’s a domestic energy system that is being used in Japan and…
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An elegant bamboo structure in Vietnam
Vo Trong Nghia Architects designed this resort welcome center on Phu Quoc Island in Vietnam out of approximately 42,000 pieces of bamboo, rope, and bamboo pins.
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Bitcoin Is a Hideous Monstrosity Made Out of Computers and Greed
Before It Devours The World, Part I
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Native American restaurants
Although there has been growing interest in exploring native foodways in the past twenty or so years, it seems there’s been little research into the history of Native American restaurants, that is,…
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Weber Shandwick provides PR for Moderna and Pfizer, while staffing the CDC
A potential $50 million contract allows PR firm to be “embedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as part of the Division of Viral Diseases team.”
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U.S. Surnames with No Vowels
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Have I reached the Douglas Adams Inflection point?
The all-knowing sage Douglas Adams had this to say about technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can…
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Mastodon Is Awesome
A hastily written guide for data science folks trying to navigate the fediverse.
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Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy and Then Killing You
In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientific anarchism event in Woodside, California. Scientific anarchism, a term borrowed from the controversial philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, concerns the way science is performed in the laboratory and the way that ideas are generated, refuted, and incorporated into…
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Notes on Ukraine: I spent most of April and some of May traveling around Ukraine
I spent most of April and some of May traveling around Ukraine, visiting the cities of Uzhgorod, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odessa. As with my other travels, I’ll write down thoughts and obse…