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Where in Europe is electric car a good idea?
<p>Politicians and car manufacturers praise electric cars as a solution to fight climate change, but the life cycle analysis of the whole vehicle shows that electric cars also cause pollution,
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
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Googling for answers costs time (2020)
When I’m learning a new language, I tend to take a very dumb approach (and I don’t mean that in some enlightened way). I’ll usually try out a tutorial or two, but if the language is similar to another language that I know, I’ll basically just start coding without investing a lot of time learning the language features…
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Why Do Famous People Get Paid $250k to Give a Speech?
The organizations willing to spend $20,000-$200,000 to hear a luminary speak include Wall Street banks, summer camp executives, and national associations of bakers.
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Los Angeles is gearing up to ban wood-frame construction
Over the summer, the Los Angeles City Council Public Safety Committee approved a proposal to expand Fire District 1, an anachronistic planning overlay that would effectively ban wood-frame construction in much of the city. Superficially premised as a measure to improve fire safety, the motion has been heavily promoted…
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Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
Every productivity wave since the PC made work faster and piled on more of it, so companies gained more than workers did. AI does the work itself, which is why this one could land differently.
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Is macOS Look Up Destined for CSAM?
Remember Apple’s failed attempt to detect CSAM in images? Would that have been similar to the way that Visual Look Up works? Is this the thin end of the wedge?
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The European Commission versus Android
Examining the history of Android explains why the European Commission may be right to fine Google for its actions around Android, even as the reasoning feels off.
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Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Confessions of a naive hamster: why the smartest people in the room keep missing that intelligence is often not the main bottleneck in the real world
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Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don’t
The American Community Survey collects data on the college majors of people who’ve graduated college. This excellent data has lots of untapped potential for family research, because it tells …
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The problematic culture of “Worse is Better”
Our industry has been infected by a dangerous meme, and it’s one that hasn’t been given its proper scrutiny. Like many memes that explode in popularity, “Worse is Better” gave a name to an underlying fragment of culture or philosophy that had been incubating for some time. I point to C++ as one of the first instances…
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You’re working in the wrong place if you’re working in an open office
Open offices misunderstand psychology and design
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Instagram Addiction
i was addicted to instagram for about a month. it upended my life enough that i realized that i was living with something new-an undesirable habit. and once i realized this, it seemed like it would be wise to try to address it or at least think about it. easier said than done.
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How to stop losing 17,500 kidneys
"Someone left a human liver at the wrong hospital’s cargo bay in 90 degree heat, and no one noticed for an hour and a half."
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Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – An Army's Role
The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both …
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Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
There is a classic thought experiment in the field of artificial intelligence which is often used to explain how an AI might inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity as a by-product of tryin…
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The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken
Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between...
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Privacy Fundamentalism
The current privacy debate is making things worse by not considering trade-offs, the inherent nature of digital, or the far bigger problems that come with digitizing the offline world.
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