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The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas (2022)
A Hackernews comment introduces a new character
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 694 posts.
182
Albertsons kills rural grocers with land use restrictions
Albertsons uses land use restrictions in Mammoth, CA to stop competition so it can be the only store in town.
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Don't squander public trust on bullshit
a tragedy of the public emergency system commons...
185
Notes on El Salvador
In 1995, El Salvador had an intentional homicide rate of 139 per 100,000, the highest in the world and one of the highest rates recorded in modern history. Like all educated middle-class Americans,…
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Dear Europe, please wake up
Europe is special to me as I consider myself a proud European, but damn we need to talk. Europe please wake up.
188
Why can't my mom email me?
Proton email keeps sending my non-Proton email accounts encrypted emails. I figure out why and show you how to turn it off.
189
The world has probably passed peak pollution
Millions die prematurely from local air pollution, but we can reduce this number significantly.
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A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
Taking a look at a16z’s blog posts.
191
The forgotten war on beepers
30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
192
I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers (2021)
Several years ago I had the chance to lead two seminars with a group of high-performing Chinese high school seniors. Each seminar had between 20-35 kids; each of these students was a graduating sen…
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Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred…
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So thieves broke into your storage unit again
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story. All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by ...
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Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected
New study shows that the default apps collect data even when supposedly disabled, and this is hard to switch off
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Fungus breaks down ocean plastic
A fungus living in the sea can break down the plastic polyethylene, provided it has first been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Researchers from, among others, NIOZ published their results in the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment. They expect that many more plastic degrading fungi are living in…
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FireChat was a tool for revolution, then disappeared
With FireChat, people were free to communicate and coordinate with each other without the message having to first filter through someone's data center. Why did the app shut down without notice?
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Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
Some quick thoughts on moving from Twitter/X to BlueSky and how I'll try to use social media after being burned once by Twitter.
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I love programming but I hate the programming industry
On being a faulty cog in a machine when the machine itself is faulty
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I'm funding Ladybird because I can't fund Firefox
I’ve been meaning to write this one for a while, but the announcement of the Ladybird Browser Initiative makes now a particularly good time.
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The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)
Early websites. In the beginning, website HTML was crafted by hand. Your average personal — or corporate — website might consist of hand-edited HTML subsequently uploaded, probably via FTP, to a web server which knew only how to serve static files.
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The Intellectual Obesity Crisis (2022)
Information addiction is rotting our brains
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Group chats rule the world
The importance and dynamics of private group chats in shaping tech discourse
204
The Moral Economy of the Shire
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
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Why YC went to DC
A few weeks ago, I went to DC to start engaging policymakers and be the voice of little tech. Here's why.
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Some notes on influenceering
The ups and downs of publishing non-commercial content on the internet.
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Why is it so hard to build an airport?
Airports are a critical piece of modern infrastructure.
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2023 Letter
A walk-and-talk; Crumb; running and tangping; Knausgaard; Elon as Palmer Eldritch; memelords; Chicago as a megacity; Norton; and a pause.
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A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
I’m unsure how popular GameNOW magazine was, but over the course of two years, they pulled off one of the weirdest running gags I’ve seen in a game magazine, just to have fun at the expense of an irate reader who didn’t like Final Fantasy VIII .
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Escaping surveillance capitalism, at scale
Self-hosting and paid subscriptions promise an escape from surveillance capitalism. What guarantees do they really offer, and at what cost?