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Smartphones Are Toys First, Tools Second
If you time-traveled to the 1960s, or even the 1980s, and tried to describe smartphones to the people you met, they wouldn’t believe you.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 742 posts.
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Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
Americans 60 and older spend about seven waking hours a day alone. This rises to over 10 hours a day among those living on their own.
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The best-kept secret of Dutch biking: the Dutch hardly bike at all
Here is perhaps the most shocking chart in all of Dutch transportation:
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America has two economies, and they’re diverging fast
Red and blue America dramatically represent different segments of the economy. Here is what you need to know.
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Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take
One teacher compares the life of a middle schooler in 2008 versus 2018. There is a startling difference. Learn what life looks like for middle schoolers today, and gain valuable tips on how to reclaim childhood for your kids in this digital age.
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A World Run with Code
What the world will be like when computational intelligence and computational contracts are ubiquitous. Transcript of a talk by Stephen Wolfram from a 2019 blockchain conference.
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True Surprise
How many true surprises are there in life? This was the question I asked Mrs. Bastard when she was pregnant with our first child and wanted ...
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Key Polish Political Party Comes Out Against Article 13
With only days to go before the final EU debate and vote on the new Copyright Directive (we're told the debate will be at 0900h CET on Tuesday, 26 March, and the vote will happen at 1200h CET), things could not be more urgent and fraught. That's why today's announcement by Poland's Platformy...
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The Ethics of Web Performance
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
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Exploring alternative funding models for the web
The online advertising ecosystem is broken. The majority of digital advertising revenue is going to a small handful of companies, leaving other publishers with scraps. Meanwhile users are on the ...
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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4
This is part 4 of an intermittent yet always enjoyable series: • Part 1: the rise of the ancient Puebloan civilization in the American Southwest from 10,000 BC to 750 AD. • Part 2: the rise and col…
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The curious economics of being ripped off on holiday
I once wrote that there are two types of charges: the ones you see coming and the ones you don’t. Perhaps I was too reductive. There’s a third category: the fees that you know are looming, but the …
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People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study
Love Your Job? Someone May be Taking Advantage of You | Duke's Fuqua School of Business
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Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Why does infrastructure cost so much to build in the U.S.? The fundamental reasons aren’t technical. We’ve structured our postwar economy to use overspending on infrastructure as a way to induce short-term growth.
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The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
We use some names mostly for boys and some mostly for girls, but then there is a small percentage that, over time, switched from one gender to another. Which names made the biggest switch?
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Freeing My Phone from Google
Phones are so full of ads that you don’t even notice them anymore. Suggestions and notifications you didn’t ask for, tracking mechanisms you don’t even know are there, services over which you have no control. It’s absurd how much smartphones, a large extension of our private and social lives, are controlled and…
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The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit
May 12, 2019 @ 4:36 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and philosophy , Logic , This blogging life
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EFF Wins National Security Letter Transparency Lawsuit
A federal district court in San Francisco has ruled strongly in favor of our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records of how and when the FBI lifts gag orders issued with National Security Letters (NSLs). These records will provide a window into the FBI’s use of a highly secretive...
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r/ChangeMyView Is Graduating Reddit: Introducing ChangeAView.com
TL;DR: Reddit has been a great incubator for the r/ChangeMyView project, but we’re very excited to announce that…
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Proton Technologies awarded €2M from the EU
We are happy to announce that the European Commission has awarded €2 million to Proton AG, the parent company of Proton Mail and Proton VPN, to develop a suite of encrypted services.
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The Siege of Carrie Lam
On September 26, 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam held her first listening session after seventeen weeks of protest. Her government, which had spent the summer nearly incommunicado, had settled on these encounters as a way to heal social divisions and identify the mysterious goals of a movement whose five…
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Google Forcing Nest Cameras’ Visual Indicator Light To Be On
Google Forcing Nest Cameras Visual Indicator Light To Be On