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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 345 posts.
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“You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product”
Richard Serra? Carlota Fay Schoolman? Steve Atkins? Tom Johnson? Claire Wolfe? Andrew Lewis? blue_beetle? Tim O’Reilly?
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Don't Fly During Ramadan (2013)
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
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China is catching up to the USA, while Japan is being left behind
I have previously reported that there has been a silent revolution in science where countries like China, India, South Korea... that previously contributed few research articles... have started to catch up and even exceed the productivity of the western world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US has…
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The scourge of web analytics
I’ve been making web apps since 2003, which means that I’ve been doing this for fourteen years now, or it means that I can’t count. So, there are few people more qualified than me to tell you this:
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Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis
Previously in this series
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Decrypting Amber Rudd
1 Aug, 2017 Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube (Google/Alphabet, Inc) have formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and Amber Rudd is asking them to quietly drop end-to-end encryption from their products. You should not believe a single word any of those companies tells you about end-to-end…
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Decline of the Dad Job
Before I learnt to read I made sense of the world by conjuring up images in my mind, particularly for abstract concepts. I could count before I could read and had an image for each number. Many of …
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Real name policies and ruling the world
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The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords
Yesterday I had a bunch of people point me at a tweet from a politician in the UK named Nadine Dorries [https://twitter.com/NadineDorries]. As it turns out, some folks were rather alarmed about her position on sharing what we would normally consider to be a secret. In this
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Autism and gender imbalance in tech
I’ve just seen two talks back to back. The first was about AI, where the now compulsory first question came from the audience ‘Why are the...
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What People Think You Can’t Say in Silicon Valley
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Tim Ferriss, and most recently Sam Altman (but see his clarification) think there are too many opinions…
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Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl
On the thirty-first anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history, over one hundred people from the former Soviet Union shared their …
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The internet as existential threat
Some days I wonder if we are completely screwed. So today’s post is a perhaps slightly hysterical outburst.
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Living on the Edge – Story of an Iranian Student in US
Story of an Iranian Student in US
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Please Stop Writing Secure Messaging Tools (2015)
This is my first Patreon-supported essay, which went out a week early to my $10 and up subscribers. This was written in part in response to issues with the IWMF check-in tool, but it's something I've been concerned about for some time.
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Handling attraction in a professional setting
I met my wife at a tech holiday party. I saw her from across the party and the rest of the people in the room disappeared…but this story doesn’t go the way you think. We didn’t ge…
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The destruction of graduate education in the United States
If and when you emerged from your happiness bubble to read the news, you’ll have seen (at least if you live in the US) that the cruel and reckless tax bill has passed the House of Representat…
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What I believe II
Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the “new” P≠NP proof: I’d again bet $200,000 that the paper won’t stand, except that the last time I tried that, it d…
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What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
It is hard not to be impressed — and perhaps a little alarmed — by the progression. In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue beat the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov. It was a hugely ex…
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“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing and Expecting Different Results”
Albert Einstein? Al-Anon? Narcotics Anonymous? Max Nordau? George Bernard Shaw? Samuel Beckett? George A. Kelly? Rita Mae Brown? John Larroquette? Jessie Potter? Werner Erhard?