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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 302 posts.
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Hyperliterature
The vast majority of fiction on the web is nonergodic : stories presented as linear text. Yet, in an age where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, literature can take on any shape imaginable. In recent years, some pieces have taken advantage of these capabilities—not as a gimmick, but in a way that is…
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End of the conference era?
Chris Adamson notes a significant contraction in iOS and related conferences recently (via Michael Tsai ).
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Flyover video of Jupiter’s Europa
NASA engineer Kevin Gill stitched together images from two 1998 observations of Europa by the Galileo spacecraft to create this super smooth flyover video of th
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Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility
Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into. I’m going to pick up where I left off there. For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me). In red, you have the positions that a company...
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A Day in the Life of Americans
I wanted to see how daily patterns emerge at the individual level and how a person’s entire day plays out. So I simulated 1,000 of them.
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Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
NOTE 8/23: I've written a more thoughtful version of this argument for the Atlantic. They're not the same, but if you only read one piece, ...
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How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing
Tokyo has rightly been getting some plaudits for housebuilding of late, and this post brings together some stats that illustrate just how impressive its record is. First, some definitions and conte…
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Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
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What's in those mysterious cabinets?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Michael Lewis and the parable of the lucky man taking the extra cookie (2017)
In 2012, Michael Lewis gave a commencement speech at Princeton University, his alma mater. In the speech, Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The
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The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders
“This is only the beginning,” writes Kevin Kelly in an essay in Wired’s 25th anniversary issue. “The main event has barely started.” He’s talking about the inter…
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Mobile Device Management invades privacy
With BYOD, companies are more than ever keen on protecting their data. MDM tools, like Google Apps, do more than that; they invade your privacy.
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Patents: how and why to get them
Some of my points are a bit naughty. But I maintain that they're based in fact and fairly widely known. So well-known, in fact, that I'm surprised to have never read it somewhere else.
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Conflict vs. Mistake
Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear…
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Mythology About Security
Ed Felton tweeted a few days ago: “Often hear that the reason today’s Internet is not more secure is that the early designers failed to imagine that security could ever matter. That is a myth…
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Hi, I’d Like to Add Myself to the New Yorker (2016)
Personal site of designer Frank Chimero
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Advanced Denanonymization through Strava
Strava is getting some bad press, because its heatmap can be used to infer the existence and floorplan of various US/UK military and govt...