Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,069 posts.
Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy.
Event sourcing is an excellent software design pattern. Instead of persisting current state of an asset and mutating it in place. An asset is represented by the events through its life cycle. When the current state of an asset is needed its re-computed from the events.
Keynes, Explained Briefly
If you read the economic textbooks, you’ll find that the job market is a market like any other. There’s supply (workers) and demand (employers). And the incredible power of market competition pushes the price (wages) to where those two meet. Thus massive unemployment is about as likely as huge unsold piles of wheat…
Trust Science
Well, of course we all do trust science. We trust Bernoulli's Principle every time we get on a plane; we trust celestial mechanics when we take the kids outside to watch a scheduled lunar eclipse ; we trust subatomic physics when we relax with an iPod; we trust the laws of chemistry every time we strike a match; we…
Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now?
Verizon’s cellphones are designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill for its mobile Web services, even if you immediately cancel the action.
A bot that allows you to say only original content
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the c…
90% of China's billionaires are kids of high-ranking officials
My name is Victor Shih, currently an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University specializing in Chinese politics. This blog shares my musing and discussions on Chinese politics and political economy with interested readers. You can contact me at vshih AT northwestern.edu, and my website, where…
Lessons I learned building an MPs' expenses crowdsourcing app for the Guardian
As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team …
Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and no…
Paul Buchheit: Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life
"Open" is a great thing. Everyone likes it. Unfortunately, nobody agrees what open is. There are many meanings, but in general, I think "ope...
Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…