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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 338 posts.
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Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook
It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook , so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.
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An Idea for the Economy that will Freak Out a lot of People
The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield . In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can. The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money. That’s a premise that should make the…
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Stanford CS enrollment increase "downright scary"
Eric Roberts just sent out a note of concern to the ACM Education Council, and he kindly allowed me to share it here as a guest post. When I read his note, I thought about my May 2009 CACM column …
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Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme
Quill Grid: The Starlink for AI becomes a network. An optional, opt-in distributed AI grid where idle Quill One devices share spare capacity, earn credits, and donate AI hours.
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Anonymous message to NATO
Greetings, members of NATO. We are Anonymous. In a recent publication, you have singled out Anonymous as a threat to “government and th...
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Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick
A friend of mine noted recently that I seemed a little antagonistic about Facebook recently — mostly on my Facebook account, which is some irony for you — and wanted to know what I had …
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No Copyright Intended
On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order. A couple things struck me about this video. First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting…
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Flickr is dead
You know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s totally irrelevant. The Google one looks far better, but that’s so beside the point at this point.
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Why Facebook's 'Frictionless Sharing' violates HTTP
Facebook has this new feature , whereby the act of simply reading a web page, under certain conditions, gets it posted to your news feed, ...
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Meanwhile, just East of Silicon Valley, in Tupelo Mississippi...
I did an unvacation in Tupelo, Mississippi this past week. An unvacation is my new M.O., in which I travel to someplace fun but don’t take significant time off while there. My old friends Henderson and Rebecca live in Tupelo, and it was a really special opportunity to spend some time with them. One of the many great…
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How to beat Apple
In the near term, companies making iPhone and iPad competitors are never going to beat Apple at their own game. Apple has supply chain advantages, a massive num
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Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark
I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to…
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Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.
A great find: In his 1956 short story, “Let’s Get Together,” Isaac Asimov describes security measures proposed to counter a terrorist threat: “Consider further that this news will leak out as more and more people become involved in our countermeasures and more and more people begin to guess what we’re doing. Then…
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All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook...
I don’t mean to overhype this, but frankly I don’t think it would be possible to overhype something as huge and profound as what Facebook introduced yesterday, at least from what I gather reading the reports coming out of F8. Timelines. Open Graph. Apps. Music. Video. Bam! It’s all there and it’s all amazing and huge…
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The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme
Krugman spells out the Paradox of Thrift: when the interest rate goes to zero — like the past five years — cuts in spending reduce
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Schneier: The Dishonest Minority: Security and its Role in Modern Society
Three months ago, I announced that I was writing a book on why security exists in human societies. This is basically the book’s thesis statement: All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective—and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives—as…
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How My School and District Failed its Students
How My School and District Failed its Students The following is by Frank Beard, a graduate of Drake University and a former Teach For Amer...
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Apple actually lost in Dutch court, not the opposite
OK. So here the short form of what happened in the dutch court today. Apple has LOST all claims wrt design and copyright.