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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?
There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…
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Insights on the First Three Years of the Right to Be Forgotten at Google
This blog post distills the key findings of our longitudinal analysis of how Europe’s right to be forgotten (RTBF) is being applied in practice.
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How unions won a 30% raise for every fast food worker in California
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. 40 years of declining worker power shattered the American Dream (TM), producing multiple generations whose children fared worse than their parents, cratering faith in institutions and hope for a better future.
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Of Booze and Brogrammers
There's been a little bit of noise about the culture of "hard partying" at programmer conferences. Ryan complains about binge drinking , a...
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Yet Another "People Plug in Strange USB Sticks" Story
I’m really getting tired of stories like this: Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers. And if the drive or CD had an official logo on it, 90% were installed. Of course…
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Programmer Migration Patterns
I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how programmers seem to move from one to another. There's a more common...
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High school programming taught in Haskell in Argentina
Today I want to share a wonderful experience. I'm professor of introductory programming in two years at Florentino Ameghino School and one...
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Mars will have a lot of wicker furniture
So we've landed on Mars, now we need somewhere to sit. It's pretty expensive to ship furniture from earth, so time to start building some chairs.
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PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts
Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@ging...
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Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
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Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?
Hacker News is a popular social news website, mostly covering technology and startup topics. It relies on user submissions and moderation, where each submitted story can be upvoted and commented by users, which in term determines whether the story reaches the front page and how long it stays there.
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Strava raises prices but can’t tell you how much it costs anymore
Some days, I just can’t decide if Strava tries hard to hurt their reputation, or, if it just comes naturally. Today, however, I’m left flabbergasted.
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Why is American administrative capacity in decline?
Some speculative hypotheses
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Flags Are Not Languages
Famous Birthdays has been described as a “ Wikipedia for Gen-Z ”. It’s an insight into popularity across the internet of influencers, not just from traditional stage and screen but also social media channels such as TikTok and Instagram.
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Fortnite and the Good Life
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The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should…
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Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design
I have just recently discovered that my previous post about Commodore BASIC went modestly viral, not only featuring on Hacknernews but getting its own story on Hackaday . Gosh. This in itself has provoked some discussion. Its also resulted in a lot of people telling me that NO COMMODORE WAS…
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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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ATProto and the ownership of identity
The new age of social-enabled apps
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Apple's Best Option: Decentralize iCloud
What can Apple do in the face of a UK order to weaken encryption worldwide? Decentralize iCloud, to start.