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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
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Why Is Everyone So Boring?
Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning.
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What I want from the internet
Connection and intimacy are still possible on the internet today.
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Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
Or "Spiderman Is My Boyfriend"
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Are you breathing? Do you have email apnea? (2014)
It’s believed that many of us spend seven hours or more in front of screens each day. In 2011, researcher Emmanuel Stamatakis, found that “…even those who exercise can’t overcome the detrimental ef…
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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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TikTok's Enshittification
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?
The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty, but it is still the reality for almost one in ten people worldwide.
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Per capita CO₂ emissions Over Time
An interactive visualization from Our World in Data.
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“Pay or Okay” on tech news site heise.de illegal, decides German DPA
The Data Protection Authority of Lower Saxony (LfD) decided that the “Pay or Okay” solution used by heise.de was unlawful
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AI Written, AI Read cartoon
One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used…
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The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
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Statement on 'Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses' review
June 2024 update: Following engagement with the authors, the decision has been made that changes to the plain language summary and abstract would not impact the scientific integrity of the content and so Cochrane is no longer seeking updates to the plain language summary and abstract of this version of the review…
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Meditations On Moloch
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
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Almost all of the world’s mammal biomass is humans and livestock
Humans and livestock make up 95% of the world’s mammal biomass; wild mammals are just 5%.
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How is money created?
Most of the money in the economy is created by banks when they provide loans.
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High U.S. Health Care Spending
Administrative costs, prescription drugs, and physician and nurse wages may contribute to excess health spending in the U.S., compared with peer nations.
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Global Perspective on U.S. Health Care
This cross-national comparison of health care systems assesses U.S. health spending, outcomes, status, and service use relative to 12 other high-income countries.
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For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.
The number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the third consecutive year in 2024 but remained among the highest annual totals on record.