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Finality does not exist in payments
Many people believe some transactions are final. The reality is a bit more complicated, and involves technical, social, and legal factors.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 135 posts.
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Google now deleting health clinic searches from location history automatically
Editor's note – May 12, 2023Last year, we launched an important update to Location History. We remain committed to improving the experience and making it as helpful…
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An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.
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Hackers gaining power of subpoena via fake “emergency data requests”
There is a terrifying and highly effective “method” that criminal hackers are now using to harvest sensitive customer data from Internet service providers, phone companies and social media firms. It involves compromising email accounts and websites tied to police departments and government agencies, and then sending…
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Google fined €150M, Facebook €60M for for non-compliance with French legislation
This page is no longer available. Order to comply or sanctions issued by the CNIL may be made public. In this case, a time limit shall be specified in the decision. Once this time period has expired, the organisations that have been given formal notice or sanctioned are no longer identified in the public decision. For…
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GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe’s consent popups are unlawful
EU data protection authorities find that the consent popups that plagued Europeans for years are illegal. All data collected through them must be deleted. This decision impacts Google’s, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s online advertising businesses.
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Understanding the War in Ukraine
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022429 points605 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine an…
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Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times
What the NYT Cancel Culture Editorial Got Wrong, And What It Got Right
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I was wrong, we need crypto
To say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010s, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose: Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the…
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My Favorite Liar (2008)
[the following recounts an exceptionally powerful teaching technique employed by an economics professor of mine at university; teaching fact-checking and skepticism by salting it into the content of his delivery]
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Universal's Audible Watermark (2012)
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone. Update, April 8, 2013: Can you hear it? Take the watermark listening test. Update, January 14, 2015: Check out the results of the listening test. A while ago, I wrote about my confusion regarding Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns…
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A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system (2013)
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …
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Inflation, part 1: On shelter futures
A deep-dive
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Inflation is differential and restructuring (2021)
When it comes to inflation, economists get it wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere differential.
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Where did all the “reject” buttons come from?
More and more websites have added an option to say “no” to cookies and other tracking- as foreseen by the GDPR. Where did this trend come from?
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Mastodon.technology Shutdown
Dear mastodon.technology community,
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The Cult Inside Google
I worked for Google for about three and a half years as a video producer. I was fired because I raised alarm about a doomsday cult that…
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Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”
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Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft
Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology2022442 points881 commentscited by 4Society, Policy & Culture details
From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft’s AI Platform division. I’ve been working in the software industry for over a decade, and while I’ve often encountered some combination of the words “diversity” and “inclusion,” how those words have been translated into culture and policy has varied dramatically…
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Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
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Workplace surveillance is coming for you
If you want to do something terrible with technology, you can't just roll it out on people with money and social capital. They'll complain and your idea will tank. Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege…
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Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)
(This is another of my speculative pieces and nothing to do with Star Wars. This one is for an older trilogy.) Old Tom Bombadil. Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the…
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Missouri governor’s office responsible for teacher data leak
Missouri Governor Mike Parson made headlines last year when he vowed to criminally prosecute a journalist for reporting a security flaw in a state website that exposed personal information of more than 100,000 teachers. But Missouri prosecutors now say they will not pursue charges following revelations that the data…
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Court Ruling shows the GPL is both copyright license and contractual agreement
For Immediate Release — IRVINE, CA, USA — Software Freedom Conservancy announces it has succeeded in federal court with its motion to have its lawsuit against Vizio, Inc. remanded back to Superior Court in Orange County, California. Vizio, Inc. previously filed a request to “remove” the case from California State…