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Microsoft and the Metaverse
Defining the Metaverse, and explaining why Microsoft is well-placed for the virtual reality opportunity
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,050 posts.
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“It's not peaches and cream either for men”
I spend a lot of time talking about men’s mental health because it’s what I, as a man, know about. And like with everything, the truth is complicated. We live in a patriarchal society that privileges men in certain ways, but also hurts them in other ways. The harmful effects on our heavily gendered society especially…
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Not school or homeschool, but modular learning
Meet the new wave of teachers, artists and techies who are reinventing K-12 education one kid at a time
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Pieces of Shit
I listened to this song last night.
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The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)
Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word “tweet” was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see “Quiet announcement” at the end of the page.) The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a […]
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Community Banking and Fintech
How and why small, local banks power the fintech apps you use.
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EU proposing to regulate the use of Bayesian estimation
The European Commission just released their Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence . They finally get around to a definition of “AI” on page 60 of the report (link above):
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War Starts
22nd May 1990. The two Yemens, north and south, become one. The mood of the world seems to be for the dissolution of old animosities. In that same week, East and West Germany sign a treaty to begin reunification, the US and USSR agree to destroy their chemical weapons, and the World Health Organisation stops…
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The small web is beautiful
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
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Social media is broken – a new report offers ways to fix it
A new report offers solutions to the problems that hound social media, from the spread of misinformation to the lack of competition.
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Strange domain names that developers bought
Not every domain is serious business. Here's a few of the fun ones that we at Stack Overflow owned, as well as those owned by our community.
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Chicago Faces 135% Incr in Carjackings So Legislator Seeks to Ban GTA
My home city of Chicago continues to reel from soaring crime rates. Among the categories of increasing crime is a 135% spike in carjackings. One would think that the legislators would be focused o…
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New Texas Abortion Law Likely to Unleash a Torrent of Lawsuits Against Education
In addition to the drastic restrictions it places on a woman’s reproductive and medical care rights, the new Texas abortion law, SB8, will have devastating effects on online speech. The law creates a cadre of bounty hunters who can use the courts to punish and silence anyone whose online advocacy,...
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Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign:
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Woo for Its Own Sake
Software development is a funny profession. It covers people who do stuff ranging from register twiddling in device drivers and OS guts, to people who serve web content, to “big data” s…
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John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
It happened for me back in the eighties, when I encountered the definition of “Life” in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker : “Information, shaped by natural selection”. That concise distillation—an actual description of what life is , as opposed to all those tired and exception-prone checklists that only talk about what…
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Library Holdings from Tokyo Univ. Now Available Through the Internet Archive
Written by Professor Tom Gally, University of Tokyo, and Katie Barrett, Internet Archive & JET Program AlumTranslations by Tomoki Sakakibara, University of Tokyo (日本語はページ下部にあります。 Scroll down for Japanese version.) As our global society grows ever more connected, it can be easy to assume that all of human history is…
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Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels
To: Oversight Board Good day, My name is Igor Petrov, I am an independent historian. The list of my publications, including those for Cambridge University Press, is available at https://independent.academia.edu/IgorPetrov40 On August 6, 2021, whilst conducting archival research and working with…
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Critical Thinking Isn't Just a Process
Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying
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Turkey's Financial Crisis
Earlier this week, Mohamed El-Erian was lost for words.
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Who Will Control the Software That Powers the Internet?
Control over important internet services has shifted from open source to proprietary services operated by big tech. As a result, people got access to technology, but that shift also created serious problems.
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Foraging humans, mammals and birds who live in the same place behave similarly
Foraging humans find food, reproduce, share parenting, and even organise their social groups in similar ways as surrounding mammal and bird species, depending on where they live in the world, new research has found.
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“Raiders of the Lost Ark” Story Conference Transcript (1978)
G We’ll just talk general ideas, what the concept of it was. Then I’ll get down to going specifically through the story. Then we will actually get to where we can start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick…
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Why admitting Covid is Airborne is so hard
Evidence for airborne spread of Covid-19 is strong, but authorities underemphasize airborne protections. The curious history of infectious disease reveals how this anti-airborne bias emerged.