901
The decline and fall of the hit instrumental song
Nowadays vocalists control popular music—but that wasn't always true
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
902
Any type of hormonal contraceptive may increase risk of breast cancer
An analysis of data by researchers at Oxford Population Health’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit has shown that use of progestogen-only hormonal contraceptives is associated with a 20-30% higher risk of breast cancer. The results are published in PLOS Medicine.
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Passing for Human: Philip K. Dick in Vancouver (2018)
Philip K. Dick arrived in Canada on February 16th, 1972, as guest of honour for the 2nd Vancouver Science Fiction Convention ( VCON-2 ), an all-expenses-paid invitation, jointly sponsored by the science fiction societies of Simon Frazer University and the University of British Columbia. He was 43 years old, the author…
905
The time I yoga-balled an Apple store employee
My personal website and blog
906
Is it legal to mix cash in a jar? How is Bitcoin mixing any different?
Chris Blec asks the following question: Source: Twitter Chris's premise is that it is "not illegal" for him to get together with a bunch of ...
907
SVB was particularly poorly run
Banks manage their liquidity through their asset composition and choice of liabilities. Badly run banks have volatile liabilities and assets.
908
Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks
One of the things that frustrates me with having a local music library is the tedium of tagging. While there are tools (like beets or MusicBrainz Picard) to make it easier, I feel there are fundamental issues with the design… Continue reading →
909
The History of Coffee (2015)
Who discovered coffee trees? Who invented coffee as we enjoy it now? Learn coffee history and its journey across the globe from the 9th century to today.
910
Michael F. Flynn has died
Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,...
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Bruce Schneier’s Plan to Reinvent Democracy
I have a confession to make: I am a complete Bruce Schneier fanboy. I have been following the cryptographer, Harvard lecturer and privacy specialist for many years, and was delighted to meet him face-to-face at last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, where he gave a keynote (registration required) on how to…
914
How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?
In the culture wars, hypersensitivity and accusations of ‘hate’ risk leading us into an Orwellian future
915
Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it
Amazon is very proud of its "flywheel": at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the "everything…
916
Humanness in the Age of AI
A path to an open and permissionless identity protocol.
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Plans to plant billions of trees threatened by undersupply of seedlings
| The University of Vermont
919
Colorado Supreme Court Upholds Keyword Search Warrant
Today, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the country to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant—a digital dragnet tool that allows law enforcement to identify everyone who searched the internet for a specific term or phrase. In a weak and ultimately...
920
ASU: The New American University (2021)
I had the pleasure of stumbling upon the work of Michael Crow, Arizona State University’s president, earlier this year, and I so enjoyed his thoughts on knowledge production that I immediately wondered how his philosophy would translate to ASU as an organization. Turns out, President Crow was many steps ahead of me…
921
Loadsharers: Funding the Load Bearing Internet People (2020)
The Internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can’t be monetized and thus don’t have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. Services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries - software without which the net and…
922
AI has poisoned its own well
What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can…
923
Nuclear power is too safe
If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people.[David Okrent]
924
My techno-optimism
Special thanks to Morgan Beller, Juan Benet, Eli Dourado, Karl Floersch, Sriram Krishnan, Nate Soares, Jaan Tallinn, Vincent Weisser, Balvi volunteers and others for feedback and review.
925
Fanatics Is Building a Weird Monopoly over Sports Trading Cards
Fanatics has rolled up power in all areas of sports merchandising. And now it's coming for baseball, football, and basketball trading cards.
926
Physically Demanding Work Tied to Male Fertility
Occupational factors associated with higher sperm concentrations and serum testosterone
927
Autoenshittification
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
928
Rheinmetall pilot project for curb stone chargers for EVs
Rheinmetall launches first pilot project for innovative curb stone chargers with the City of Cologne and TankE
929
The Airbnb Bubble Popping Will Pop the Housing Bubble
This is how bubbles collapse: the "vital few" 4% sell at whatever the market will bear, pushing prices down, and the 64% awaken to the rapidly narrowing window for locking in bubble capital gains. Here's how we can tell if a speculative bubble is a bubble : everyone says it isn't a bubble --the market has reached a…
930
AI Is Useful for Capitalists but Probably Terrible for Anyone Else
AI is finally useful for business, and everyone is likely underestimating its impact. But unless AI is open-source and truly owned by the end users the future for everyone but the software providers looks grim.