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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 700 posts.
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What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates?
The old economic world may be leaving us, but its pathologies stubbornly remain.
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Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think
It's myth-busting time! The world's richest and largest city is cheaper and roomier than you think.
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Test scores are not irrelevant
Some claims that test scores don’t predict college success don’t add up.
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Oxford University Press’s new logo is unfathomably bad
appearance vs. reality in art & business
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Where did the long tail go?
'The Long Tail' was supposed to boost alternative voices in music, movies, and books—but the exact opposite happened. What went wrong?
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How Trustpilot Extorts Businesses
Trustpilot promises to be “free and open” — in reality, they are the exact opposite, holding companies at ransom, and outright violating…
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Tech journalism doesn’t know what to do with Mastodon
What happens when innovation doesn’t fit the usual narratives?
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How to stop being “terminally online”
determine why you're "terminally online" to accomplish the tasks detailed further in the list, you have to do some soul-searching. this starts with acknow...
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How we slowed the subway down
Every day, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lurch into dusty darkness as their Manhattan-bound 4 or 5 train leaves Brooklyn’s Franklin Avenue station. As the blurred fluorescence of the station…
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The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off
Let's address the mammoth in the room: the fediverse , the network of mastodon servers, is very inefficient.
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/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification
The moment /r/antiwork died was tailor-made for infamy. Head moderator Doreen Ford went on with Fox host Jesse Watters for an interview…
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How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising
Gerrymandering distorts the will of the people, but the basic math of geographic representation makes it difficult to get rid of, unless we get rid of representation for geographic districts.
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Steelmanning: Discover the truth by helping your opponent
Tackle the steelmanning challenge, a three-step method to win arguments by helping your opponent. Its only downside: Nobody will ever take it.
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Snap updates happen without user consent
Recent versions of Ubuntu turned on a particularly annoying feature: intrusive system notifications that warn of the pending update of a Snap managed application. Here’s an example:
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Justice Stevens reads the fine print
Matthew Butterick
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How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
If this isn't the famous robbery scene, from Arsenal MS. 5070 Boccaccio Decameron its as close as I can bother to get for a...
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AI Art Panic
If you’ve been on the internet at all lately, you’ve seen AI generated art and discussion of the impact of the tools. You’ve also probably seen a lot of hate for AI generated art. There’s a lot of drama going on, as art focused communities across the internet decide how to handle this. Does AI generated/assisted art…
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The smash and grab of Kroger-Albertsons
The Kroger-Albertsons supermarket deal is uglier than you might expect. The "special cash division" of $4 billion may be intended to get around antitrust enforcers.
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The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
This is a different type of post. Here, instead of presenting the voice of a single person, I have translated selected stories shared on Weibo and elsewhere on the Chinese Internet—or more fittingl…
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The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling
It will take about three minutes to read this column. Whether it’s worth three minutes depends on me, of course. I will do my best. But it also depends on you, on your attitude to time and, perhaps…
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What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.
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A “Sideways” supply response in California winegrapes
New data on the Sideways effect
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Thatcher killed the UK’s superfast broadband before it even existed
Grrrh! I could get really annoyed about this! Living and working in rural Stirlingshire has its advantages for sure, but fast broadband is not one of them.
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An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia's U.S. News Ranking
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
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My deepfake DALL-E 2 vacation photos passed the Turing Test
I went on a real vacation, and created photos of a fake vacation using DALL-E 2. Most people couldn't tell the difference.