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Terminated
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 700 posts.
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Why Galesburg has no money
It's not the normal stories we tell ourselves, but a new analysis
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Privacy vs. “I have nothing to hide” (2019)
A recent post received numerous comments asking why I was so concerned about privacy and asking what I have to hide. Here's my reply...
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Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes
A textbook currency crisis, triggered by a bunch of policy mistakes.
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Workplace surveillance is coming for you
If you want to do something terrible with technology, you can't just roll it out on people with money and social capital. They'll complain and your idea will tank. Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege…
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Finnish as a world language?
It is obviously difficult to answer this question with certainty. At the moment there seem to be several factors which would hinder such a development.
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Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
This paper derives from a short, time-bound, review of the literature, which sought to investigate the question “Did Insurance Fire Brigades let uninsured buildings burn?”. The question is set in the context of property fire insurance in London, from 1680. The situation was possibly comparable with other large British…
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Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
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10% of the top million sites are dead
Top 1 million domains? More like the top 1 million lies
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Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)
(This is another of my speculative pieces and nothing to do with Star Wars. This one is for an older trilogy.) Old Tom Bombadil. Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the…
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Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam
I have not posted for a very long time. Writeups on this site often take dozens of hours. Time for something lower effort!
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Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions
In-flight messaging I was on a Delta flight the other day, and I was thinking about how they offer free messaging from your smartphone. How do they limit the wifi? Maybe they have some basic filter that says “deny everything except the urls for these 3 messaging apps”, which makes sense conceptually. What if we don’t…
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Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons
Except me. As of one minute ago I confirmed what I noticed last Wednesday. According to the all seeing Google, on the entire world wide web there are but three Creative Commons licensed images of a…
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Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards
AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞
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Simplicity of IRC
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…
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Forty percent of the world’s shipping consists of fossil fuels to be burned
Doing the right thing makes other right things happen
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YouTube cancelled my Nextcloud installation how-to
Chris McCormick - News
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Kharkiv Rubyist during the war: We are still here
To not become "old news," I write to the Ruby community in days of war Russia leads against my country.
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Book Review: “Viral” by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley
Happy New Year, everyone! It was exactly two years ago that it first became publicly knowable—though most of us wouldn’t know for at least two more months—just how freakishly horr…
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I’m not convinced by the new lab leak debunking
It’s still an open question
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The unreasonable fight for municipal broadband
I love Longmont’s municipal broadband, but we had to fight Comcast every step of the way to get it.
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Phone is still the best way to order pizza
Apps create more friction for ordering pizza
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Who cares about diversity?
All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires.
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Why aren't smart people happier?
A new way to think about brainpower.
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An ‘everything app’ would be bad for liberal democracies and free markets
Monopoly This is the difference between “pro-business” and “pro-market” policies which are often conflated. The former leads to concentration of