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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 338 posts.
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End artificial scarcities to increase productivity
My colleagues and I realized this over beer: dry erase markers cost almost nothing, yet a lecture hall never contains functioning dry erase markers.
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Richard Feynman on education in Brazil
From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
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Apple is professional, the web is amateur
It’s common knowledge that Apple doesn’t get the web in general and social in particular. I’ve been thinking a lot about the social part recently and I think Apple’s failure to execute there can shed some light on their failure with the web in general.
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Dr. Stallman responded to my open letter
Whoa. Thanks for all the attention and feedback, everybody! In case you're curious: I ended up emailing the letter to RMS and got a reply earlier today. I am skeptical of advice from people who disagree with what I stand for. --Dr Richard Stallman Overall, commenters seem to have had fairly positive things to say, but…
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The Tragic Death of the Flip
The creators of the Flip resisted the urge to gunk it up with complexity. It was a wonderful device and getting better. Then Cisco killed it the day before a new one was supposed to ship.
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When hard books disappear
[Translations: Japanese] Hard books are on their way to extinction. Biologists maintain a concept call a “type specimen.” Every species of living organism has many individuals of noticeable variety. There are millions of Robins in America, for instance, all of … Continue reading →
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Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS
Last year I shared how Twitter was moving more and more towards a closed, less-standards oriented model of sharing content as they upgraded their design to bring more people to the Twitter.com website. At that time, they removed the prominent RSS icons and made it only possible to access an RSS feed for an individual…
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A Business Insider retrospective
After reading Ryan McCarthy’s post at Reuters about Business Insider, I wanted to run some numbers.
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Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
I just bought 3 domain names from GoDaddy. No, that is not news, the news is that I had to use a US based VPN before the purchase went through. (the VPN made the godaddy server think I was browsing from the US). The first 50 times I tried making
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The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
Back to: Rudy #3: Looking For The Big Aha. | Forward to: Rudy #4. More on The Big Aha.
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Be aware of "morality" clauses from domain registrars
GoDaddy has received a lot of bad press for their support of …
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Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability
The sustainability pages are essentially done, although I plan to improve them and respond to inadequacies people find. Having done my best to show that material progress is sustainable, I can justifiably turn my attention to the future and present ideas about what progress people will want and what can be achieved…
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Google: Patently Absurd
How is Google’s argument here different than simply demanding that Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, *et al* should simply sit back and let Google do whatever it wants with Android, regardless of the patents they hold?
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