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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 629 posts.
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
I entered Boston University Law School in the Fall of 2011. Like most law schools during the heyday of blogging, BU's prospective students website featured a handful of blogs that were written by current students. To get a blog on the site, you had to be selected among various applicants, and, if you were selected…
Updates: Our open letter made the WSJ, and has been tweeted by Matt Yglesias and others. See also Boaz Barak’s thread, and a supportive tweet from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley). If you…
As a kid, my parents would open the television set, and we would get to watch whatever the state television decided we would watch. It was a push model. Some experts pick the content you need and they deliver it to you. You have little say in the matter. There was one newspaper in my … Continue reading Stop spending…
The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery has just published my editorial, "Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants," explaining how interoperability was once an engine for competition and user empowerment – and how that ended.
Elite overproduction … describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the…
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For the last month or so, the IRC world has been embroiled in drama over the new ownership of Freenode. For me, it culminated yesterday when I was banned from Freenode.
Patent Trolling’s twin: Copyright trolling I’ve covered Patent Trolling in some detail in the movie The Patent Scam. Today I’ll briefly go over a variation on […]
NBC drops the ball on distribution
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
Chris McCormick - News
Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996. Here’s what we had then, in chronological order: LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, SQL, O…
Shane Frederick points us to this article from 1999 , “Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance,” about which he writes:
The pandemic and vaccine rollout have highlighted where the West has lost its way; we need new defaults about information, change, and speed.
Since this happened after I was banned from Freenode , I didn't get to observe this first hand, but this is the situation as I now understand it.
