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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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Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks
One of the things that frustrates me with having a local music library is the tedium of tagging. While there are tools (like beets or MusicBrainz Picard) to make it easier, I feel there are fundamental issues with the design… Continue reading →
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The asymmetry of nudges
Answering the age-old question: why do bad decisions happen to good companies?
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A Future Without MPEG
Table of contents Introduction The situation today The competitors What is/will be available What the market offers Licensing of other media coding standards My views on the next steps of media coding standards A disclosure My forecast So, what will happen next? And now? Introduction My plan this week was to talk…
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A Liquid Nitrogen Cocktail Party
Dewars, safety rules, barware, and drinks: how to throw a liquid nitrogen cocktail party, in the spirit of Dave Arnold's Liquid Intelligence, without anybody losing an eye.
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The Scariest Company in Tech
The last few days have rocked the mobile world. HP is posturing itself as a major new player with WebOS. Nokia jumped from their burning platform into the sweet embrace of Microsoft (they are no do…
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A plea for better open source etiquette
Update: this post kicked off a lively debate over at HackerNews. As a result of doing consulting, I’ve been hopping between a large number of OSS tools and libraries for the past few years. A…
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What if Quality Journalism Isn't?
Baekdal is your premium site for media reports and trend analysis. Subscribe from €7.55/month
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Airbnb in the Himalayas
Above my mountain-top cottage in a beautiful Himalayan village, the road ends and the forest begins. After sunset, flying squirrels come out. Leopards
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IA or AI?
I’ve been reading a paper [1] written two decades ago, which itself is an account of events two decades before that. It is Alan Kay nominally writing about the history of a programming langua…
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Michael F. Flynn has died
Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,...
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Big problems at the timezone database
The last time I wrote about the timezone database on this blog, the database was under threat from a lawsuit. Fortunately that lawsuit w...
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Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope
The stakes are incredibly high, and Apple knows it. Whatever you think of Apple’s decision to implement these features, they’re not doing so lightly.
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The Astonishing Prescience of Nam June Paik
I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago.
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Megaupload could spawn caselaw more destructive than SOPA
The GH engineers correctly identify the MySQL dependency as a problem. It’s such an easy one to remove, though!
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Akira Kurosawa’s Record of a Living Being
One of the first Japanese commercial features to directly address the fear of nuclear holocaust and the implications of the atom bomb, Record of a Living Being, which is better known as I Live in F…
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IBM Stretch, the NSA, and MLK
The narrative can change, but we must overcome the disinformation and fear that has overtaken the United States.
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Multidimensional analysis of plot arcs in thousands of TV and movie scripts
Note: a somewhat more complete and slightly less colloquial, but eminently more citeable, version of this work is in the Proceedings of the ...
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License Haiku
I think that people really use software licenses to express intentions, and don’t really read the details of the licenses. So I think that licenses should be made as simple as possible, so that they don’t disagree with intentions… thus, haiku licensing:
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