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The Cult of Work You Never Meant to Join
Are our most valuable qualities being exploited at work? How our strengths get twisted into forming bad habits that just might kill us.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
5882
Fake emergency search warrants draw scrutiny from Capitol Hill
On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was troubled by the report and…
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Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
Flock's 'licence plate readers' read much more than license plates. A judge says what they record must be released.
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Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go from Here
The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by...
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Assange Hearing Day 15
When Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the US Government burgled the office of his psychiatrist to look for medical evidence to discredit him. Julian Assange has been obliged to submit himself, while in a mentally and physically weakened state and in conditions of the harshest incarceration, to examination…
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European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance
It’s not actually banned in the EU yet—the legislative process is much more complicated than that—but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces…
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What Makes a Good Conversation?
This blog post is about the NAACL 2019 paper What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments by Abigail See, Stephen Rolle...
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You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview
Hiring is broken. A brief history of technical interviewing, look at where things standa today, and what can be done.
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Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization
The 2020 US election is finally over, and all the election excitement of the last week reminded me of something I had been meaning to look into: Sergey Shpilkin’s data visualizations that cle…
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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…
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Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. The latest target: live content
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Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back
On the Strait of Hormuz, fertility research, and the millions of dollars bet on artificial wombs that missed the point
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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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Apple is building the metaverse substrate
I thought it might be fun to take a semi-serious look at technology from the Apples WWDC21 keynote, and how it might help building the metaverse. I may have spent way too much time watching sessions at 1.5x, and it may have broken my brain a little.
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The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market
How America Destroyed Its Cheapest Homes
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Desire to Move Permanently to U.S. at New Low
In 2025, fewer people worldwide are imagining their futures elsewhere. The U.S., long the world's most desired destination, is attracting less interest than at any point in nearly two decades.
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Rolling the ladder up behind us
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
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How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect
How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect. | exotext
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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing | exotext
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An argument for a return to Web 1.0
The web was established with the best of intentions. The basic idea was that if everyone could share their thoughts and ideas with the world, the best ones would be vetted and float to the top. The bad ones would be ignored and pushed to the bottom.
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The New York Times is wrong about Haiti
The New York Times recently published a series of articles about the history of Haiti.
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Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver
The more I think about the rift between political journalism and Nate Silver, the more it seems that it's one that's fundamentally an issue of epistemology — how journalists know what they know. Here's why I think that's the case. When we talk about the epistemology of journalism, it all eventually ties into…
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Criticizing Computers
Do you ever get really mad at your computer?