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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,108 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Charlie Stross on Common Misconceptions About Publishing: Ebooks
Back to: We appear to have a hung parliament | Forward to: PDF: Satanic horror from the abyss, or merely evil?
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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…
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The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked.
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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.
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Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
In 2025, Google gave Amandla Thomas-Johnson's data to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.
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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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Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Patty Smith.
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F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
For the past 15 years, F-Droid has provided a safe and secure haven for Android users around the world to find and install free and open source apps. When co...
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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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Moving Forward on Basic Income
We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/basic-income]: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently completed a joint PhD in Social Work and Political Science at the University of Michigan…
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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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Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans
Today, the Guardian newspaper confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans. This revelation should end, once and for all, the government's long-discredited secrecy claims about its dragnet...
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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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Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
In reaction to the invalidation of the Privacy Shield in July 2020 by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), US President Joe Biden adopted on 7 October 2022 a new legal framework (Executive Order) to strengthen safeguards on the collection and use of personal data by US intelligence agencies.
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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