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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
X (fka Twitter) has quietly redesigned its 🔫 Water Pistol emoji to display as a firearm. This diverges from the cross-platform conversion of this emoji from firearm to water pistol from 2016 to 2018.
Organizing and generating variety in politics
The impact of Evergrande has caused financial distress to spread faster and more forcefully than Beijing’s financial regulators expected, putting pressure on them to move quickly to stop the contagion. But they cannot rescue Evergrande’s creditors without also undermining their fight against bad debt.
Monitoring employees in the name of productivity or security can cause a lot more problems than it solves.
Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
It is tempting to excuse Clubhouse’s flaws as growing pains, but the app’s design and rollout illustrate just how little Silicon Valley and its venture capital backers have learned.
And other misadventures
Analyses reveal single standard dose efficacy from day 22 to day 90 post vaccination of 76% with protection not falling in this three-month periodAfter the second dose vaccine efficacy from two standard doses is 82.4% with the 3-month interval being used in the UK. (82.4% effective, with a 95% confidence interval of…
Microsoft has come full circle from the company that cared more about Windows than Office; the retirement of the Office name is possible precisely because Microsoft gave up on Windows and went to t…
A new Mississippi law requires us to block full access to Bluesky unless all users complete age checks. We have concerns about this law’s implementation.
Global demographic transition signals a shift from young, growing populations to older, stable ones, reshaping societies and economies.
Former Provost John Etchemendy, in a recent speech before the Stanford Board of Trustees, outlined challenges higher education is facing in the coming years. Following is an excerpt from that talk.
America’s .0001% is becoming more meritocratic - to an extent.
I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to…
In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate…
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
This xz backdoor thing reminds me of a story I heard from friends that worked at a tech company that made cell phones. They had a great coder that worked on the project, he had put in work as a contractor for a few months, and due to the quality of his work he was hired in full time. After two months he simply stopped…
301 This blog has moved to jwz.org . This post has been archived here . Please update your links. 301
How 16 Senators Accidentally Saved Democracy (Then Watched It Die)
To those seeking true intelligence, autonomy, and control among machines, the domain of analog computing, not digital computing, is the place to look.
A while ago, someone came to me and gave me some data involving AT&T iPad customers to publicize, the full story of which I’m sure you’re all familiar with from my previous excellent blog posts. I was subsequently raided by the FBI and arrested , though I have been under gag orders and haven’t been able to discuss the…
