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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025
Throughout 2025, I spoke a few times about our home energy solution, including our grid usage, our solar array and our Tesla Powerwall batteries. Now that I have a full year of data, I wanted to take a look at exactly how everything is working out, and, in alignment with
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How to spot a good fake ID
One of my favorite things in the world is the very specific, strange competencies that people develop over the course of a job. Carpenters might be able to estimate the length of anything just by looking at it, architects might be able to quickly sketch a remarkably accurate picture from memory, etc.
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Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
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It's time to build: a New World's Fair
We must look to the past — to the World's Fairs — to build the future.
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My simplified response to Paul Graham's simplified essay
Paul Graham published a simplified version of his essay on income inequality . Here's my simplified response: It is true that many social...
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Gemini's "uselessness" is its killer feature
So it’s borderline useless for all but the simplest use cases, and even there it does a very subpar job. I’d like to have an inline image every now and then, or organize things in some multi-column layouts or the like, or a table. 19th century newspapers could do this, and if your technology can’t emulate typography…
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The sins of the 90s: Questioning a puzzling claim about mass surveillance
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, gave an interesting talk at NDSS 2024 titled "AI, Encryption, and the Sins of the 90s".
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Nobody optimizes happiness
People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not?
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How to travel around the world for a year
While my last post covered my previous year traveling, writing and programming [http://old.alexmaccaw.com/posts/traveling_writing_programming], this article will go into the specifics of planning your own round the world trip, including flights, costs, activities and accommodation. I'll show you how affordable…
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ZestCash is Not Good.
A couple of days ago, TechCrunch featured a favorable story about a new startup called ZestCash, which provides an online lending alternative to existing payday loans (I'm not going to link to them directly, you can get to them on your own easily enough). The story regurgitates ZestCash's copy about the evils of the…
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In defence of the boring web
Having recently had the pleasure of doing most of my internet interactions on a tablet or a smartphone because my laptop was ‘hors de combat,’ I was able to further reflect on the state of the modern web. 1 With Web 2.0 being already passé, Web 3.0 being not the latest fad any more, and talks of Web 4.0, 4.5, and 5.0…
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Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet
In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype—owned by Microsoft—was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company’s blog to deny it. Turns out that wasn’t quite true. Or at least he—or the…
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The tyranny of the wagon equation
A mathematical extension to ACOUP's recent blog post on military logistics
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The Mathematics of Paul Graham's Bias Test
A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …
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When 70M people visit your joke site
What happens when 70 million people visit your joke site?
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A warning about 'model welfare'
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge far harder.
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America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
If the economy's single pillar goes down, Trump's presidency will be seen as a disaster.
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Mastodon’s eternal September begins?
The fediverse is dealing with a huge wave of Twitter people bringing toxic ideas with them.
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Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario
So where might we be headed instead?
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Congratulations: We now have opinions on your open source contributions
More thoughts on supply chain and package managers.
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How we turned the tables to catch my sister’s Bumble stalker
My sister’s stalker, who had used Instagram and Bumble to work out where she lived and start stalking her in real life, was recently…
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Meta
Facebook’s reorganization into Meta is the ultimate bet on the power of founder control.
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