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What if we made advertising illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,213 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk because I need some chill
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It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds
The very short version: it is madness to continue transferring the running of European societies and governments to American clouds. Not only is it a terrible idea given the kind of things the “King of America” keeps saying, the legal sophistry used to justify such transfers, like the nonsense letter the Dutch cabinet…
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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
src= alt="Always has been astronaut meme" / "Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." Everyone in San Francisco is talking about t
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Google Memory Loss
[Update: As of Jan 1, 2023 this is fixed! Thanks to Danny Sullivan and John Mueller of Google for figuring out what was going on. Yay!] I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better. [Update, Feb. 2022: It’s still happening.]
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Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
An analysis of which stories are removed from the front page of Hacker News due to moderator intervention.
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My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT
IFTTT will maintain Pinboard support through at least the end of 2016. While this date is not specified in their full statement , I have confirmed it with the CEO and am pleased to announce it here.
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I Went to SQL Injection Court
Chicago argued that answering a FOIA request with a database query means creating a new record. Matt Chapman sued, I wound up on the stand explaining SQL, and now there's a bill to fix it.
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How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
On 22 June 2016, Unicode version 9.0 was published . As part of that, 4 new symbols were introduced – and another one was re-purposed.
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Time to Take a Stand
It is time for tech companies to start speaking up about some of the actions taken by President Trump’s administration. There are many actions from his first week that are objectionable. In...
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Bing AI can't be trusted
Microsoft knowingly released a broken product for short-term hype
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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
It's just normal crime
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The cognitive costs of air pollution
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented . However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in…
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AI winter is well on its way
Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to
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Ask vs. Guess Culture
When unreasonable requests are followed up with "but you could have just said no!" Exploring the clashes of ask culture and guess culture, at home and at work.
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How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
Catalonia, with Barcelona as its capital, is currently one of Spain’s seventeen autonomous comunities. It has a long story of pro-independence movements, and has even declared itself independent in the past. Nowadays, the political climate is very heated up. A majority of catalan people want to hold a referendum for…
950
Fight back against Google AMP (2018)
Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short.AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this…
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Stable Diffusion is a big deal
If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on with Stable Diffusion, you really should be. Stable Diffusion is a new “text-to-image diffusion model” that was released to the …
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The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy
“Under His Eye,” she says. The right farewell. “Under His Eye,” I reply, and she gives a little nod.
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Life is not short
The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.
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Inside a viral website
Peeling back the curtain of running a viral meme website for 5 days. More details than you could ever hope for.
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I would rather see my books get pirated than this
Amazon and Goodreads must take steps to combat the flood of AI-generated content that will mislead readers and damage author reputations.
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Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
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The Insecurity Industry
The greatest danger to national security has become the companies claiming to protect it