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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
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Confiscating your ice cream cones
Hey, remember that awesome Hello City Planner video about how the Government is going to have to come and confiscate your ice cream cones? I thought the best thing about it was that it was actually created by the SF Planning Department, but I was wrong. It gets better: it turns out, it's a true story!! Before Ice…
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Japan’s silent movie culture is still going
There was a cultural divide in benshi preferences, rather like the difference in taste between those
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Charles Stross YAPCA keynote: The world in 2034
This should be titled Keynote talk for YAPC::NA 2014 . What's up with the title?
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Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
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The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game
Raffael Hickisch spent years dreaming up conservation tools he couldn't afford to build. Then he built them himself, with an AI agent and a country's worth of public data.
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The NSA: ‘The Abyss from Which There Is No Return’
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization based in Charlottesville, Va.
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An election forecast that’s 50-50 is not “giving up”
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might have mistakenly thought that, when predictions happened to…
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What happens when the public lose confidence in academic findings?
In an important new paper, Rafael Ahlskog and Sven Oskarsson show that half of the effect size in observational studies, even in conservative estimates, is composed of confounding.
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Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas
OpenAI sent Governor Greg Abbott a letter outlining its commitment to responsible AI infrastructure in Texas. The letter supports reliable, transparent growth that benefits Texans.
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AI Safety and the Age of Dislightenment
Model licensing & surveillance will likely be counterproductive by concentrating power in unsustainable ways
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Please stop putting cookie pop-ups on your website (2022)
TL;DR; - they prevent companies from denying services to people that use technology to block tracking and ads. ...
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The AI Hate Progression
I think I've spoken at length in other places about how I am a very staunch AI hater and covered everything I hate about how the tech is pre...
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The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States
America's major high-tech manufacturing industries have not escaped the general decline in manufacturing employment.
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“They’ll Just Make It Illegal”
Cryptocurrencies, Public Goods & the State Late last year, I and a colleague from HKS were meeting with a VC I’d gotten to know in San Francisco. As an opening salvo in the conversation, the VC…
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States and cities decimated SROs, Americans' lowest-cost housing option
Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities.
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A Tipless Restaurant is a Well-Run Restaurant?
There are many reasons to oppose tipping. Most recently, a natural experiment in two San Diego restaurants suggests that tipping actually detracts from restaurant quality.
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Self hosted email continues to steeply decline
Ten years of DNS measurements reveal three trends across the Internet's most popular domains: email continues to consolidate around two providers, DMARC enforcement has hit a plateau, and a surprisingly large long tail of infrastructure defies easy classification.
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E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’
UConn chemists’ novel device quickly detects carcinogenic chemicals and DNA damage from e-cigarette vapor.
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Tradition is Smarter (2018)
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If…
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Earth to Mozilla: Come back home
In her blog post explaining the Brendan Eich resignation, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, writes, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we …
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Strong Towns Has Filed a Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering
The Minnesota board that regulates engineering licenses is abusing their power in order to stifle the free speech of Charles Marohn and retaliate against the Strong Towns movement for their advocacy on transportation, infrastructure, and engineering reform. Strong Towns has filed suit in federal cou
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We are going to kill "unalive"
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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