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Against Tulip Subsidies
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
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Google did something seriously wrong
Here's what happened. When Google rolled out Buzz last week they activated an unknown number of users and chose people for them to follow automatically based on who they email most frequently with. Presumably these people had to also be on Gmail. And the list of people you follow is public. Therefore the list of…
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LiveJournal stripping users' affiliate links
LiveJournal has done something stupid again. Let me rephrase that: LiveJournal has done something REALLY fucking stupid. Links to about 150 e-commerce sites that users post to their LiveJournals are being redirected through a 3rd party website. These redirected links also open in a new window.…
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A Censorship-Resistant Web
Imagine someone put a document up at http://pentagonpapers.com/volumes/1.html that a) some people want to read and b) some people want to keep you from reading.
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Schneier on Security: Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start
China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further. Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to…
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The Stock Market Is Still for Suckers
I wrote a whole series of articles warning people about the stock market over the years. You can see them here . It’s gotten worse. So I thought i would write some more about why you should probably avoid putting any new money into the stock market…
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Hope You Enjoy the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (Apple vs. Google)
On the growing sense that Apple is gearing up for war against Google.
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Apple bans an iPhone e-reader because it provides access to the Kama Sutra
Eucalyptus is an iPhone application that that lets you download and read books from the expansive Project Gutenberg library of free public-domain works. Judging from its Web site, it's more or less comparable to Amazon's Kindle application--except all the content is free, and the interface looks to
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Things I Learned Eating On $1 A Day For A Month
Learn what 10 lessons one writer took away from eating on $1 a day for a month, and use the real-world insights to plan your own food budget challenge.
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How much do rockets pollute?
Some might find it ironic that an organization like NASA, who studies our atmosphere, is ok with rockets polluting it so much. Or isn’t it weird that Elon Musk, the same person who is pushing sustainable energy with Tesla also has a rocket company that runs on fossil fuels? So today we are going to do a deep dive into…
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques
On Tuesday of this week someone posted the following question to the Hacker News website: How long has Mahalo been using keyword domains like this? The link in the story points to a search in Google, [inurl:tip_guidelines mahalo]. The results of this query show a list of somewhere between 180 and 270 sites (Google…
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The Shameful Defenestration of Tim
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
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Why is computer science a sausage fest?
Usually I avoid topics like women in technology because (1) it is a can of worms, and (2) I can really only speak for myself. For the most part, I’d rather be seen as a person in technology than a woman, but this weekend the twitterverse erupted with opinions about Google sponsoring female students to attend JSConf …
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Vaccines don't cause autism
The debate is essentially over and the final word is in: vaccines do not cause autism. The results of a rigorous study conducted over several years were just an
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NYU Professor Scott Galloway: Ouch
A student in the NYU Stern School of Business wrote an email to business school professor Scott Galloway complaining about the professor’s late policy. He arrived one hour late and the profe…
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The Just-World Fallacy
The Misconception: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it. The Truth: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often g…
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Peter Norvig's Election 2008 FAQ
This is an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the 2008 United States Presidential Election. I need to disclose up front that I am an Obama supporter. However, with the exception of the very last question, this FAQ is designed as a collection of factual information (such as the latest poll results) and of…
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