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Boeing Engineers Lost Control of the Company
David analyzes the root causes of the Boeing 737 Max crash. Read here.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Assange Hearing Day 16
On Wednesday the trap sprang shut, as Judge Baraitser insisted the witnesses must finish next week, and that no time would be permitted for preparation of closing arguments, which must be heard the immediate following Monday. This brought the closest the defence have come to a protest, with the defence pointing out…
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FedEx shipping damage creates fractured artworks
Since 2007, artist Walead Beshty has been cleverly using FedEx’s shipping infrastructure to create a series of artworks. He constructs glass objects that fit ex
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Assange Hearing Day 17
During the hearing of medical evidence the last three days, the British government has been caught twice directly telling important lies about events in Belmarsh prison, each lie proven by documentary evidence. The common factor has been the medical records kept by Dr Daly, head of the jail’s medical services. There…
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Mozilla not accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015
As you may have already seen, Mozilla is not in the list of organizations accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015.People who have observed the list carefully may have noticed that
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I'm not worried about AI job loss
We're not in a February 2020 moment, and ordinary people will be fine
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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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San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
It's impossible to argue that San Francisco hasn't changed my life dramatically. When I moved to the Bay Area four years ago, I was an inexperienced kid who was working at a Genius Bar in an Apple Store. I didn't know JavaScript at all—hell, I could barely program and my useless liberal arts degree was doing nothing…
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The high price of mistrust
When we can’t trust each other, nothing works. As we participate in our communities less and less, we find it harder to feel other people are trustworthy. But if we can bring back a sense of trust in the people around us, the rewards are incredible.
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The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language
An extra dimension that you can play with
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Be careful about what you dislike
Observations about the problem of having strong opinions and sharing them with others.
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Is Kickstarter covering up a scam? An open letter to CEO Yancey Strickler
Dear Yancey, I love Kickstarter. When I backed my first project in 2012, I was happy and excited to be given the opportunity to support creators with my pledge. Since then, Kickstarter has been an …
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Why English doesn't use accents
And why French is full of them
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Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)
Well I'm in the working world again. I've found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it's returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Beca...
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How Finland plans to implement the first nation-wide basic income in the EU
According to Liisa Hyssäalä and Olli Kangas, all Finnish citizens would in some years receive 800 euros from the governement without condition.
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The Case for RSS
For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet. The MacSparky RSS, for example, gives RSS applications a list of all the articles I post here since you last checked int. It... Continue reading →
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Thinking will become a hobby
These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an…
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The Rot Economy
At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business…
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I Tried to Virtually Stalk Mark Zuckerberg
In late 2015, I finished reading Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and was very inspired to try to automate something in my life. At the same time, I have been always fascinated by Mark Zuckerberg…
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Why aren't smart people happier?
A new way to think about brainpower.
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Won’t Subscribe
Since I’m lightly employed these days, I enjoy keeping up with the news. In recent weeks, I’ve been blocked by the paywalls of the Wall Street Journal , Globe & Mail (closest thing Canada has to a national newspaper), the Times/Sunday Times (of London), the Telegraph (also UK), Business Insider , and Bloomberg …
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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
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The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
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How Apple Cheats
As every iOS developer knows, Apple can do whatever they want with their own native apps, meaning they can and do use private APIs. It’s not too surprising, ...
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LLMs can be exhausting
Some days I get in bed after a tortuous 4-5 hour session working with Claude or Codex wondering what the heck happened. It's easy to blame the model - there'...