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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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Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told yo…
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Clean Coder Blog
Peter was showing the relationship between age and reputation on stack overflow. The correlation is unmistakable. The older the programmer, the better the reputation, by far. He also shows, in the following graph, that the reason for this correlation is that the older programmers answer far more questions than the…
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How popular is Donald Trump?
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
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Lab-made? CoV2 genealogy through the lens of gain-of-function research
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
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Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
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New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
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Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countr…
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Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. “Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things.…
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AI Written, AI Read cartoon
One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used…
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Big Debt Crises
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares his unique template for how debt crises work.
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Women in Science
Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest…
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Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’…
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What Colour are your bits? - Ansuz
As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between id...
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Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
I. Vox’s David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here, but the the…
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E-mail addresses as user IDs: stupid policy
Once again, Apple is facing a "hacking" fiasco that may have resulted from its own amateurish user-ID policy. It's not that Apple was hac...
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All In All, Another Brick In The Motte
One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do…
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The Missing Missing Reasons
Members of estranged parents’ forums often say their children never gave them any reason for the estrangement, then turn around and reveal that their children did tell them why. But the reasons their children give—the infamous missing reasons—are missing.
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Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
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What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able t…
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Better Genderless Pronouns in English
Writing or speaking English, we always face a conundrum when we need a pronoun to refer to a person without specifying gender. Previously we needed a way to cover both male and female; nowadays some people state that they don't want to be considered either of those, and I believe in respecting their wishes.
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Protecting Lives & Liberty: How Contact Tracing Can Foil COVID-19 & Big Brother
If you'd like to help translate this comic, click here to see what translations have already been done! If your language hasn't been done yet, send a Pull Request to that repo with your translated comic, or send it to . Thank you! 💖
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The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
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Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
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Freedom On The Centralized Web
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as clo…
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Gell-Mann Amnesia
Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area.
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Why everything you have said about the determinants of health expenditure is wrong in one million charts: a response to Noah Smith.
Household income determines health spending, mostly via higher intensity, not prices. US behaviors are consistent with well-measured income in multiple dimensions.