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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Around the time of the Great Depression, a man named John Maynard Keynes made an incredible discovery. The reason so many people were out of work was not really because of irresponsible banks or high taxes or reckless government policy. It was really much simpler than all that: there wasn’t enough money.
If you haven't had Belvita breakfast cookies, you have probably had Biscoff cookies, which are similar. These are a classic airline snack. You've probably ha...
Meta's Threads.net sure looks a lot like App.net. Is Meta due for a pivot? The legislation the company supports suggests yes.
Aldo Coresi explains: “The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the…
Last Friday, the TSA snuck out a document updating the “privacy policy” for the nude body scanners. On Tuesday, reports started coming in on the change, including right here. Professi…
Shrouded in secrecy and isolated from the world, North Korea exudes an air of mystery. Hardly anything is known about the country except media stories about their dear leader, Kim Jong Un – h…
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....
Big Brother meets Big Data
A few years ago, my work sent me on a training course. It involved the usual things, trust exercises, team bonding, and personality profiles. I filled in a few forms, answered some questions, and the very professional looking lady marked up my paper and said, "I see that you're a Scorpio. That means you're focused…
This post previously appeared in EIX. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opi…
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…
"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." -Balzac
Notes and observations, five days in.
A city of the grandiose, filled with the humble
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The…
Panos Ipeirotis , a colleague at the NYU Stern School of Business , received considerable media attention when, in a blog post he subsequently removed , he discussed how his aggressive use of plagiarism detection software on student assignments poisoned the classroom atmosphere and tanked his teaching evaluations. As…
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…
Neal Stephenson and I were not standing in order to make it quite clear who Neil #1 was and would always be. I spent a couple of days ...
I’ve never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating. The media, pundits, and academics have desperately tried to paint the Brexit voters as ignorant, backwoods troglodytes who only voted to leave the EU because they don’t like brown people.
As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case ...
Who killed J. Robert Oppenheimer's Communist lover?
Ebola is one of the nastiest, most frightening viruses known to man. Its victims suffer fevers, muscle weakness, and other symptoms that pr...
IMPORTANT : this blog post is correct as of 15 December 2021, and all the text below is unchanged since then. At that time two borders - Russia to China, and China to Laos - could not be crossed due to COVID. The outbreak of war in Ukraine has also meant that trains
