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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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Signaling as a Service
01 Intro One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. The book makes two main arguments: a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking b) Our brains deliberately hi
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The Hierarchy of Cringe
Cripples and lovely women are both tired of being looked at, they are weary of an existence that involves constantly being observed, they feel hemmed in; and...
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Price of a bot army revealed across online platforms
The first global index tracking real-time prices for buying fake account verifications on 500+ online platforms in every country has been launched by a team at the University of Cambridge.
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Patents are out of control, and they’re hurting innovation (2017)
The government issues thousands of new patents every week — each one a new regulation — with little to no oversight or review.
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The phones of Ukrainian president Zelensky
Interesting telephone equipment in the offices of Ukrainian president Zelensky
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Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”
Data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte relates how he came to defend Aaron Swartz in the JSTOR incident and how he, Tufte, was a hacker himself.
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Status as a Service
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
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63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide (2024)
Not one cuisine, not eight, but many more. Our best shot at a comprehensive-ish guide.
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Jonathan Coulton on MegaUpload and piracy
I wrote this thing on Twitter this morning about the MegaUpload shutdown, and it’s gotten some crazy traction on the old internet. In addition, I’ve just done a couple of interviews for NPR on the subject, and I think I may have said some crazy, provocative things. There are many comments and questions out there…
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On being targeted by the NSA
As quoted in the original article on Das Erste: We've been thinking of state surveillance for...
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The House Intelligence Committee's Surveillance 'Reform' Bill Is a Farce
Two bills reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are headed to the House floor. Meanwhile, FBI agents have used Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications, including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a…
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Nuclear power is too slow
One common and plausible argument against nuclear power is that it is too slow.
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Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
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The Electric Car
The electric car is going to take over the world. Soon. Let me explain. 75% of US consumers and over 85% of US millennials own smartphones. Perhaps more amazing is that 1/4 of people in the...
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Google: “Any harm Epic has suffered is not irreparable and is of its own making”
Domain registriert bei united-domains.de
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For First Time, Half of Americans Favor Defending Taiwan If China Invades
2021 Chicago Council Survey data show a majority of Americans support a range of US policies towards Taiwan: recognition as an independent country, inclusion in international organizations, and a US-Taiwan free trade agreement.
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People don’t want to commute; they just don’t want to miss out
We recently met with GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij to talk all about how they scaled a multi-billion dollar company with beyond 800 employees, fully remotely.
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Web3 Is Not Decentralization
It's just not. Here's a deep dive into why, exactly, I think that.
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Is Ketamine Neurotoxic?
It is clear that ketamine at a sufficient dose & frequency can and does kill neurons through NMDA-driven excitotoxicity. However, what does a sufficient dose & frequency mean? There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. While it does increase neurogenesis in the only two places in the…
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When Orcs Were Real
The Ancient Struggle for Homo Sapiens to Rule the Earth
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AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers
Across hundreds of Reddit threads and a small body of clinical literature, AI-driven displacement is producing an emotional category that most closely resembles grief, and the institutions causing it have no language for it.
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Zen Magnets: 6 Years of Battle End in Victory
“We will not settle for any sort of stop-sale of magnets that are perfectly safe when not misused… We vow to continue this [legal] battle until our very last drop of cash-flow blood”, promised in August 2014 , forecasting 95% chance of a glorious honorable death of insolvency on the legal battlefield.
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Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
Mozilla has built a browser add-on that transforms YouTube users into YouTube watchdogs YouTube recommendations can be delightful, but they can also be…
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