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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,067 posts.
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Stop Words as Social Signals (a result that goes against IR common knowledge)
Your daily dose of insights across life's diverse topics
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A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)
In How to Do Philosophy , Paul Graham claims that “judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.” His point is that philosophy per se is structurally flawed. How?
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HN long term change
HN visitors are generally worried that HN is changing, and most of the worries center (obviously) around whether or not it is changing for the worse.
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The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle ) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The…
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Reddit vs Hacker News traffic
After I made the movie box office charts , there were a lot of visitors from various sites. I figured it would be interesting to chart the referring site patterns the same way I charted the movies. Here are statistics for the first 60 hours after the charts were first made public.
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Against Tulip Subsidies
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
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Google did something seriously wrong
Here's what happened. When Google rolled out Buzz last week they activated an unknown number of users and chose people for them to follow automatically based on who they email most frequently with. Presumably these people had to also be on Gmail. And the list of people you follow is public. Therefore the list of…
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LiveJournal stripping users' affiliate links
LiveJournal has done something stupid again. Let me rephrase that: LiveJournal has done something REALLY fucking stupid. Links to about 150 e-commerce sites that users post to their LiveJournals are being redirected through a 3rd party website. These redirected links also open in a new window.…
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A Censorship-Resistant Web
Imagine someone put a document up at http://pentagonpapers.com/volumes/1.html that a) some people want to read and b) some people want to keep you from reading.
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Schneier on Security: Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start
China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further. Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to…
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The Stock Market Is Still for Suckers
I wrote a whole series of articles warning people about the stock market over the years. You can see them here . It’s gotten worse. So I thought i would write some more about why you should probably avoid putting any new money into the stock market…
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Hope You Enjoy the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (Apple vs. Google)
On the growing sense that Apple is gearing up for war against Google.
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Apple bans an iPhone e-reader because it provides access to the Kama Sutra
Eucalyptus is an iPhone application that that lets you download and read books from the expansive Project Gutenberg library of free public-domain works. Judging from its Web site, it's more or less comparable to Amazon's Kindle application--except all the content is free, and the interface looks to