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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
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I'm becoming AI-blind
Recently I've been catching myself having these little moments at work, when I'm trying to read a document someone has sent me and my brain somehow refuses to analyze it. It feels like I'm reading it, but I'm unable to focus on its content. I sat down to analyze these situations and realized they all have a common…
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Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith
In 2013, a failing founder posted their story on Hacker News (link). The responses were overwhelmingly supportive: "Failure is just an event, not who you are." "Get back up and try again!"
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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to Wired . You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic gunfire detection system still goes by the ShotSpotter name.
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Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)
I'm 99.99% sure that my writing this letter will have no effect, but my conscience tells me to write it anyway. Danziger's cartoon has pushed me out of my lethargy.
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Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
Show HN is Hacker News’ “showcase” page where makers show and discuss what they’ve built. A few days ago I shared my own project(https://news.ycombinator.com...
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The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation
Should AI systems treat different demographic groups unequally?
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My positive experience as a woman in tech
Women speaking up about the sexism they have experienced in tech is great for raising awareness about the issues. However, when no positive stories get out, the overall picture painted is bleak, which could scare even more women away .
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What are the mysterious light sources on light pollution maps?
I got my first telescope in 2017, in time for the Great American Eclipse. I started paying attention to the concept of light pollution, including finding detailed maps of what places had high or lo…
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The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
Antitrust critics say that homebuilding monopolies are the real culprit of America’s housing woes. I looked into some of their claims. They don’t hold up.
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How Money Moves Around The Banking System
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …
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Does Georgism work? Five years later
A guest post by Lars Doucet
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Accountability sinks
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
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The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40
In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic…
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"I think you will all appreciate this person's commenting style"
301 This blog has moved to jwz.org . This post has been archived here . Please update your links. 301
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A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term
Every infuriating thing on the web was once a successful experiment. Some smart person saw Normal site: 1% sign up for our newsletterThrow a huge modal offering 10% off first order: +100% sign ups …
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Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future
Living under permanent surveillance and what this means for our privacy
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The Internet of Beefs
You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming , right? It's a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is -- by design -- no…
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Is the world becoming uninsurable?
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