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Is it my fault if you can't handle the truth? (2019)
You can't handle it! In 2018 or 2019, I was introduced to the idea of hyper-rationality. I think it was under another name (to be g...
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
452
Why I’m betting on Nostr
Nostr - the simple, decentralized messaging protocol with the potential to replace centralized apps like Twitter and WhatsApp - is going mainstream. And fast.
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Birds make nests out of anti-bird pins
Biologists present the latest innovation in nest building: bird nests made from anti-nesting spikes.
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Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work
Imagine you had a dog. You got the dog when it was young, trained and raised it. This animal was a part of your family and you gave it little collars and cute little clothes with your family name on it. The dog came to special events and soon thought
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Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View
Whistleblower disclosures and investigative reporting have revealed a lot about what was happening—and what was known—inside Meta during the lead-up to the genocide in Myanmar, including a connection to a global wave of fake-page networks devoted to manipulation and political misinformation.
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The WFH future is destroying bosses' brains (2021)
Yesterday, Silicon Valley Analyst Jeremiah Owyang vaguely reported that executives are scared of their employees “working part-time (but paid full salary)” and “even working on side hustle startups, while on a full-time salary,” a truly terrifying prospect that has chilled me to the bone.
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Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout
If you are reading this then you most likely know about the recent news from reddit. As a result of these events, Lemmy has grown immensely in the last two weeks. The number of monthly active users has increased over 25 times, from 1.000 to 27.000 at time of writing. Suddenly Lemmy has become one of the largest…
461
Transcending My Father's Abuse
Seeing My Dad as More than a Monster
462
Post-apocalyptic life in American health care
Experiences navigating disintegrating American health care institutions, and what they might imply for life in 2037
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No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
The risks and harms associated with drinking alcohol have been systematically evaluated over the years and are well documented. The World Health Organization has now published a statement in The Lancet Public Health: when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.
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How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people
HyperTalk, AppleScript, Prograph, Automator, Swift Playgrounds and Shortcuts – all wonderful tools in their day, but none has brought coding to the crowd.
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Free and open source software projects are in transition
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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How random is xkcd? (2015)
Apparently Randall Munroe gets a lot of messages saying that the “random” button on xkcd is biased.
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People who've received a black bar on Hacker News
I'm not sure when Hacker News started adorning a black bar on top of the website after a significant person passed, but I compiled a list of people who've received it.
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Dating, education, and sex ratios
Men floundering, women most affected
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Temporary ban on behavioural advertising on Facebook and Instagram
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority imposes a ban on Meta carrying out behavioural advertising based on the surveillance and profiling of users in Norway. The ban will initially apply until October
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Denver’s e-bike subsidy program produced more new riders, fewer car trips
As cities explore ebike incentive programs and look to model Denver’s success, we offer context on the state of the ebike industry, how Denver funded and implemented their program, results, and recommendations.
472
The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
Despite aggregate productivity for the US economy having doubled over the past 50 years, the country’s construction sector has diverged considerably, trending downward throughout that period. And this is no slight decrease. Raw BEA data suggest that the value added per worker in the construction sector was about 40…
473
The infamous coin toss
In 2011 I gave a 15-minute talk to a lay audience in London. The topic I had chosen was ergodicity breaking, and the challenge was clear: how do you get this across? I invented a coin-toss gamble, which has since become a go-to illustration of ergodicity break
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WP20 and Audrey Scholars
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined…
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An invitation to a secret society
Or: why you should be a lizard
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Shutting down nuclear power could increase air pollution: study
An MIT study shows that if U.S. nuclear power plants are retired, the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas to fill the energy gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths.
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TIL: You Can Stop Updating Copyright Attribution Years (2021)
Every January 1st, an army of open source developers rushes out to update their copyright attributions in licenses and documentation. Why? Because we’ve always done it that way.
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I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
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The Placeholder Girlfriend
It became real when I saw the list. When I saw the rubric.