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Society, Policy & Culture

The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.

Any year
10592

Tumblr the Day After

It is not surprising that the news about Automattic buying Tumblr has picked up a lot of coverage. I especially appreciated the notes of support from Tumblr founder David Karp, former CTO Marco Arm…

10594

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…

10597

The Great Moon Hoax

On August 25, 1835 the <i>New York Sun</i> announced the discovery of life on the moon. It explained that the discovery had been made by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had invented a new telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle. Over the course of the next week the <i>Sun</i>…

10602

A successful example of "adversarial collaboration"

We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. . . . Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated…

10611

Mac app launches slowed by malware scan (2024)

I've always attributed slow Xcode launches to Xcode simply sucking, but I've noticed that the FileMerge app frequently launches slowly too. When this happens, the app can take a dozen bounces in the Dock before finally opening. FileMerge resides in the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/ within the Xcode bundle…

10612

Surveillance Evangelist Arrested in California

FBI agents arrested a Mexican tycoon named Jose Susumo Azano Matsura at his Coronado, Calif. home on Wednesday as part of a political bribery investigation based on captured emails, seized banking records, and covertly recorded conversations. The unfolding scandal is soaked in irony: Azano is a...