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My Talk at Microsoft
It is now public knowledge that on 4 September 2019 I gave a talk at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. I was invited and I accepted. The report of this has led to a certain amount of speculation and rumor.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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If Sapiens were a blog post
A cut-down summary of Sapiens covering the major points.
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Explaining Sex Rate Changes
According to the Post, polls say 28% of US men age 18-30 report not having sex in the last year, almost 3 times as many as a decade ago.
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Wage Stagnation
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can’t guarantee I’ve understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Som…
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Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]
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The Rise of the Electric Scooter
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right? On an electric
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On the death of my family's dairy farm
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on.
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Is true hacking dead? What we lost
Realtime rendering and videogame programming mostly, but I love computer science and visuals in all their forms. This is a notepad of my ideas.
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What is energy, actually? (2011)
That’s an easy go: energy is the amount of (on) my electricity bill, or maybe of (on) my natural gas bill. If I am very concentrated, I might add that it is also the money I spend at the gasoline pump, and if I am even more concentrated I will suggest that it might have something to do with the filling up of my…
131
A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about
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The New Wilderness
The need to regulate online privacy is a truth so universally acknowledged that even Facebook and Google have joined the chorus of voices crying for change.
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The Slow Death of Hollywood
(Big issue 7-9-2019)
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Abuses show Assange case was never about law
It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.” That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would
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Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain?
Note: I wrote this post on Thursday, and then Friday night, news dropped that the US DOJ is preparing an antitrust investigation against Google. Wow-ee. So, this post may either look better and/or …
140
Yogababble
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a fascinating episode in history. Neville Chamberlain’s first plane ride was a trip to meet Adolf Hitler. The British Prime Minister was taken by Hitler’s charisma. He believed the German leader when he promised not to invade Czechoslovakia. After his triumphant return from Germany…
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Walkability a key factor determining upward mobility of a city's residents
Bipartisan Alliance, a Society for the Study of the US Constitution, and of Human Nature, where Republicans and Democrats meet.
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We value your privacy now, but maybe not later
Everybody knows these modal dialogs when visiting a website for the first time that ask you to accept cookies and consent to being tracked by third-party advertising networks. It actually became a habit for me to always click through these things and reject any kind of tracking or use of my personal information except…
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Too Much Dark Money in Almonds
Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics? But Ansolabehe…
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Starbucks, monetary superpower
I recently spent some time on Twitter discussing the monetary wonders of Starbucks. In this post I'll bring a bunch of tweets together i...
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TSA-style body scanners are coming to public spaces
Civil Rights, Criminal Justice and Homeland Security
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The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
All my professional life, I have been driven by the conviction that the unique freedom of political cartooning entails a great sense of responsibility. But something happened...