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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
NOTE: This post is a slightly longer version of a piece I recently published on The Federalist. Their editor asked me to cut some passages because it was a bit long, but I figured that readers of my blog would…
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“Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)
Electric speeds create centres everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet. ( Understand Media , 1964.) Marshall McLuhan remains ...
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Quotes from 1992
I was recently recommended to read the book [Accidental Empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) by [Robert X. Cringely](...
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Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen
Patrick and Tyler are obsessed with progress — and they think you should be too.
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The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i…
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HK's extradition law: Not just HK people have reason to fear Chinese “justice”
By Jerome A. Cohen It’s not only “Hong Kong people” whose fate is at stake here. Anyone passing through Hong Kong airport could be detained and sent to China (compare the Huawei Vancouver extradition case). Even people who have been extradited by a third jurisdiction to Hong Kong could be subject t
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Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books
A recent judgement makes it a breach of copyright to sell pre-owned eBooks. Do publishers really want to deter everyone from buying eBooks?
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How Hacker News Stays Interesting
Hacker News buried my post on conspiracy theories in my family due to overheated discussion, not censorship. Moderation keeps the site focused on interesting technical content.
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Meditations on Moloch (2014)
I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and u…
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We’re Reading Fahrenheit 451 Wrong (2018)
I was reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a day or two ago while reading Ian Bogost on Apple’s Airpods. Bogost examined Airpods’ potential long term social consequences. …
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Rückzugsorte – Map of areas in Berlin which are the furthest away from a street
Finde Rückzugsorte abseits von Berliner Straßen
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Moscow Publishes Photocopies of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Secret Protocols
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
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When Pepsi Had a Navy
In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily th…
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Where Warren’s Wrong
Senator Warren’s proposal about how to regulate tech is wrong about history, the source of tech giant’s power, and the fundamental nature of technology itself. That doesn’t mean t…
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The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
(Note: although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, it may make sense to think of it as Part Two of a series, beginning with The Rise of the Access Economy.) There’s a classic exercise…
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Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing (2017)
Autistic burnout is a state of physical and mental fatigue, heightened stress, and diminished capacity to manage life skills, sensory input, and/or social interactions, which comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs.
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Camera sales are falling sharply
Camera sales are continuing to falling off a cliff. The latest data from the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) shows them in a swoon befitting a Bollywood roadside Romeo. All four bi…
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IBM and the Holocaust (2017)
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
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The Difference Between ‘Violet’ and ‘Purple’ (2015)
<p class="indent">People say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s take a look at the two colours in comparison (there are various shades of purple and violet, and the following
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Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
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Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)
Based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005—one entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification."
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Cook: ‘China Hasn’t Pressured Us’
Link to: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tim-cook-talks-vision-apple-breaks-ground-facility/story?id=67165042
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FBI agent accidentally reveals own 8chan posts
Updated August 4, 2019: Added link to “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded ‘Army’ To Terrorize Young War Dissidents” The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal governme…
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The invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election – ranked
It’s been a long, confusing, exhausting federal election season. We’re all tired. But put aside your worries, fellow citizens; it’s time for the invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal …
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Stop Reading News (2013)
Discover why constant news consumption makes us less informed and how to break free from information overload to think more clearly.