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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals
OR: the long overdue forest fire
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< Random thoughts of John Murray
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Addiction Markets
Corporate gambling is economic coercion, a way to shift tax burdens away from the wealthy to the poor. It's been here since the 1970s, and now it's corrupting sports and young men. Abolish it.
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2025 Letter
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way,
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Moving money internationally
SWIFT operates a messaging protocol which ties banks together with correspondent banks. This collaboration enables most international wires.
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Privacy Is Just the First Step, the Goal Is Data Ownership
Privacy for privacy sake is a weak argument, and privacy advocates should abandon it.
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Defamed by ChatGPT
Yesterday, President Joe Biden declared that “it remains to be seen” whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “dangerous.” I would beg to differ. I have been writing about th…
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Stanford hates fun
Stanford hates fun is the title of the second Stanford article in the Wall Street Journal this week. (On the first, Stanford's guide to acceptable words , enough said already.)
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An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021)
This is a song about culture wars, futurism, apocalypta, and gun math. Click to read Handwaving Freakoutery, by BJ Campbell, a Substack publication.
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Lying Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft put up an ad: Windows vs. iPad: Compare tablets - Microsoft Windows. It shows the iPad screen (left) compared with the ASUS VivoTab Smart screen (right). This is not to scale. Microsoft has d
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The Moat of Low Status
It hurts, but less than you think
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Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"
Trump admin sees China behind opposition to AI data centers
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There are no "rogue" AI agents
Identifying them as such only lets companies like OpenAI off the hook.
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Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
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I Do Not Agree to Your Terms
Apple introduced their News app at WWDC, and the other day they sent me an e-mail saying they want to include this blog in News.
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I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
In 2003, I wrote a book called Crap Towns. It seemed funny at the time. But plenty of people say it would not be possible to publish it today. Is that a problem?
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Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
A personal blog, by a programmer and IT expert. Essays, Articles, Guides, and Recipes. As well as Code, Quotes, and Links.
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I Hope Twitter Goes Away
About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. Though I’d been thinking about it for a while, ultimately leaving was a snap decision for me. Lately I’ve been reflecting on why I hate Twitter so much.
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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
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Little League wants all your information
To sign kids up for our city’s Little League baseball …
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Honestly.com – Not acting so honestly
I hate to have my first blog post after over a year be a negative one, but I feel like these guys need calling out. I recently received an email from a company, Honestly.com, that…