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The unbundling of Craigslist and Reddit
There are strong similarities between Craigslist and reddit. Both sites drive incredible amounts of web traffic, and rank highly in the Alexa rankings. Both are horizontal in nature, using a single…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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Canada's awful new proposals on “harmful” content
Canada's government is poised to pass a "harmful content" regulation. It's a worst-in-class mutation of a dangerous idea that's swept the globe, in which governments demand that hamfisted tech giants remove broad categories of speech – too swiftly for meaningful analysis.
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UK intelligence censored report on global warming and homeland security
Series: I read it so you don't have to
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Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
As you might remember from a few months ago , there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy , including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was…
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MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
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Measuring the impact of AI scams on the elderly
We worked with Reuters to measure the impacts of AI scams on the elderly
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Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?
In the middle of a conflict, good analysis is hard to come by. Because adversaries do not telegraph their plans to one another, plans depend greatly on the fact patterns surrounding their execution…
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Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app
Operating a business is risky: you can't ever be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll show up looking for. If you guess wrong, you'll either have too few workers to serve the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around and wait for customers. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."
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The NSA, Germany, and journalism
Look at the home pages of two major German news sites today, August 20. The Süddeutsche Zeitung talks about the government forcing the Guardian to destroy...
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Please Request Your Personal Data Held by Cambridge Analytica
By now, many people have probably heard about the company Cambridge Analytica . By its own admission, it played a major role in the succes...
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Autoenshittification
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
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A group of Finnish math teachers write an open textbook in a weekend hackathon
A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event s...
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Jean-Paul Sartre, Signing and Significance
Dr Craig Steven Wright: interdisciplinary researcher, founder and research leader. Qualifications, programme-building and research across economics, law, computing and digital scarcity.
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Raising Children on the Eve of AI
How do we prepare them for what we're not prepared for?
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The Beauty of Roundabouts
I have a weird soft spot for roundabouts. Maybe because I'm a software engineer and the roundabout strikes me as the simple, elegant solution while the traffic light intersection is the ad-hoc, over-engineered mess.
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We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
What the **** does that mean?
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Elon Musk, master promoter
Elon Musk is a master promoter. His ability to bring his many endeavors into the limelight is unmatched in the technology industry.
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The Airbnb Bubble Popping Will Pop the Housing Bubble
This is how bubbles collapse: the "vital few" 4% sell at whatever the market will bear, pushing prices down, and the 64% awaken to the rapidly narrowing window for locking in bubble capital gains. Here's how we can tell if a speculative bubble is a bubble : everyone says it isn't a bubble --the market has reached a…
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AI Is Useful for Capitalists but Probably Terrible for Anyone Else
AI is finally useful for business, and everyone is likely underestimating its impact. But unless AI is open-source and truly owned by the end users the future for everyone but the software providers looks grim.
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Linux doesn't have Photoshop
Linux doesn’t have Photoshop. One common rant I get to hear when I try to help someone to switch to Linux. It is almost 2020 and say what? people still agree with this statement.
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