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Meditations On Moloch
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,070 posts.
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Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .
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What share of global CO₂ emissions come from aviation?
Aviation accounts for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions. But it has contributed around 4% to global warming to date.
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The Perils of JavaSchools
Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt Dismisses the Importance of Privacy
Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information with...
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Money creation in the modern economy
Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1
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Fact Sheet | Fossil Fuel Subsidies: A Closer Look at Tax Breaks and Societal Costs (2019) | White Papers
See our latest white papers on fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel externalities .
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Ad Blocker Usage and Demographic Statistics in 2026
Interesting ad blockers user stats. Includes data on usage, demographics and more.
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Almost all of the world’s mammal biomass is humans and livestock
Humans and livestock make up 95% of the world’s mammal biomass; wild mammals are just 5%.
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Adversarial Interoperability
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.But interoperability is just the...
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US Factory Farming Estimates
How many animals are factory farmed? We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 74.9% of cows, 98.6% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.3% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the…
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How is money created?
Most of the money in the economy is created by banks when they provide loans.
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Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?
False positives cause many promising detection technologies to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack true positives are targets successfully attacked, while false positives are those that are attacked but yield nothing. This allows us to view the attacker’s…
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Long COVID: Lasting effects of COVID-19
COVID-19 can have lasting symptoms that affect many parts of the body. Learn more about the symptoms and effects of long COVID.
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Presidential Approval Ratings
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?
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Land Use
How is humanity using the Earth’s land? And how can we decrease our land use so that more land is left for wildlife?
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How much do incarcerated people earn in each state?
Prison wages come up again and again in the context of prison conditions and policies. So, we found the most up-to-date information for each state.
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Pump Up the Storage
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…
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Which form of transport has the smallest carbon footprint?
How can individuals reduce their emissions from transport?
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Ideology
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
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When and how to use masks
WHO's guidance and advice on the use of masks to protect against and limit the spread of COVID-19.
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For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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Saint IGNUcius
Stallman is a saint in the Church of Emacs—Saint IGNUcius. I bless your computer, my child! (jpeg 31k, photo by Wouter van Oortmerssen)
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Food Deserts in America: Understanding The Impact on Communities with Limited Food Access
Learn what a food desert is and the impact of food deserts in America, where communities face limited access to affordable, nutritious food options.
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The Stanford Professor Who Fought the Tax Lobby
Paying taxes in America doesn’t need to be difficult. But it's kept that way by the lobbying efforts of tax prep companies that profit from confusing tax forms.
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Days of Rage
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
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Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks
See part 2 of Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption. Earlier this month the eagerly awaited free software operating system Ubuntu 12.10 was released, and it includes a slew of new features (YouTube link), some of which have infuriated users because of privacy concerns. Over the last couple...
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Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation.
New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being searched for as a missing person,” and that “it was about her safety.”…
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing
Explore data on COVID-19 testing across the world.
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Language Log: Shakespeare used <B><I>they</I></B> with singular antecedents so there
Not happy that I cite Sean Lennon as a source of evidence concerning the way they can be used in modern English? Feeling that only something 400 years older would really convince you that it's OK. Has Coby Lubliner got news for you! Coby writes from Berkeley to point out the following lines from Shakespeare's A Comedy…