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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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ChatGPT is really good at roleplaying
ChatGPT is really good at roleplaying as strange and unusual characters with minimal prompting.
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Hate Mail and the New Religious Wars in Tech
How could something as inanimate, mass-produced and commoditized as a cellphone get people worked up enough to send hate mail to a tech reviewer?
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The iPhone obsession
Since my attempts at capturing web developers’ hearts and minds by publishing fundamental research have failed miserably but my thirst for attention continues unabated, today I will once more shout at iPhone developers. That’s proven to work .
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Herd Mentality
It’s not just that Apple *is* different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even *can* be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS.
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Facebook is ruining Instagram
I always loved Instagram. It's been my favorite social network since I had a smartphone. I was happy when it was purchased from Facebook…
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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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Don't bet on the joys of pokies (2011)
When I was working in the Cairns Casino I’d often arrive on the floor to replace a guy who had been in the industry as long as casinos had b...
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Dating: A Research Journal, Part 1 (2016)
My journey to finding love using science and data. Part 1 – how to own online dating.
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What is Programmer Anarchy and does it have a future?
A developer I know recently told me that he wasn’t interested in any new opportunities in the short term because his team were about to adopt Fred George’s post-agile concept of Programmer Anarchy…
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Abe’s New Word Order
The days when the typical foreigner in Japan was a tall Caucasian with a big nose are long gone
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The software engineer’s guide to asserting dominance in the workplace
As a software engineer, changing jobs is a way of life. Every day, beautiful recruiters from top tech companies reach out to you on…
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All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
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Visions of Alt-Berlin in “Man in the High Castle” (2017)
An MIT urban planner looks at the alternative vision for a Berlin that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built.
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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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Digital pollution
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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The Most Incompetent TSA Story Yet?
The storyline: TSA screener finds two pipes in passenger’s bags. Screener determines that they’re not a threat. Screener confiscates them anyway, because of their “material and appearance.” Because they’re not actually a threat, screener leaves them at the checkpoint. Everyone forgets about them. Six hours later, the…
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CRISPR Gene Editing
CRISPR is a recently discovered genomic tool that could potentially revolutionize genetic modification and editing, including gene silencing, editing, activating, and other crucial functions. It has made a big splash in the synthetic biology community, and mentions of CRISPR have started cropping up elsewhere in the…
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What my 11 year old's Stanford course taught me about online education
[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on 7th May 2012] My 11 year old son just took a course at Stanford. That has a nice r...
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Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button
We used to consider writing an indication of time and effort spent on a task. That isn't true anymore.
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The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
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Data on 1.2M Facebook users from 2005 (2011) [use archive.org url in thread]
Recently, a Facebook dataset was released consisting of the complete set of users from the Facebook networks at 100 American institutions, and all of the in-network “friendship” links between those…
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