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Society, Policy & Culture

The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.

Any year
7981

Archiving URLs (2019)

Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.

7984

xkcd endorses Obama

Okay, politics time. I’m a political junkie, but I’ve largely kept that out of xkcd (other than occasional cracks about science and net-related issues). So this will be a one-time thing…

7988

Nathan Myhrvold’s Evil Genius

Last year I wrote that Intellectual Ventures is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of our flawed patent system. It’s a firm that literally does nothing useful, its only business is the acquisition and licensing of patents. Not only does it have no intention of commercializing the technologies it “invents,” its business…

7993

Universities and Economic Growth

Value of $120,000 spent at Emerson College: I hired a summer intern, who had finished three years studying film and video production at Emerson College, to work with me on a series of videos for people learning to fly helicopters. He brought his own equipment to the first day of filming, including some "work lights"…

7996

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency

This is interesting: Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and…