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Tax prep companies: $90M lobbying against free tax-filing
Top tax prep companies spent over $90 million on lobbying in the past two decades since the IRS Free File Program’s launch.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 952 posts.
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Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone's wealth grow faster
A central puzzle in evolutionary biology is that of spontaneous altruism. When two creatures interact, why might one sacrifice something of value in order to help the other? Why, if I'm rich, might I want to help the poor? In one view of the problem, there's n
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Shining a light on the digital dark age
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations?
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Why I’m betting on Nostr
Nostr - the simple, decentralized messaging protocol with the potential to replace centralized apps like Twitter and WhatsApp - is going mainstream. And fast.
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AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties advocacy group, recently published a good article entitled “ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.” 1 It argues that providers within the internet “stack” should refrain from censoring traffic according to their own values. That…
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The low, low cost of committing cybercrime
The low, low cost of (committing) cybercrime, Author: Jan Kopriva
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Mastodon Is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media – In a Good Way
A comment on a Hacker News thread inspired me to contemplate why Mastodon is everything we loved about social media before…
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My Caste
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
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The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself
The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself, and it's mostly not Biden's doing.
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Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN
GENEVA (29 August 2023) – Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly engaged by organised criminal gangs into online criminality in Southeast Asia - from romance-investment scams and crypto fraud to illegal gambling - a report issued today by the UN Human Rights Office shows.
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Windows 11 system components use the default browser to open links in Europe
Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 23531 to the Dev Channel. Changes and Improvements [General] [REMINDER] Insider Pr
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I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
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ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
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Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?
The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty, but it is still the reality for almost one in ten people worldwide.
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A note to young folks: download the things you love
Many years ago, my favorite podcast was The Totally Rad Show. It was a fun video podcast where the hosts reviewed movies, games, TV shows, and other general nerd stuff. The hosts were Jeff Cannata (who last year I called the podcasting GOAT), Dan Trachtenberg (who went on to direct
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When your classmates threaten you with felony charges
A few weeks ago, I was part of a talk at DEF CON 31 called The Hackers, The Lawyers, and the Defense Fund. I was asked to share my experience receiving a legal…
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Frequent and infrequent users of social media respond differently to rewards
Habitual and nonhabitual social media users respond differently to likes, shares and comments.
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Lie still in bed
One of the most impactful pieces of advice I ever got was just to lie still in bed.
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Web scraping for me, but not for thee
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to...
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The EU's war on behavioral advertising
Meta recently conceded that in-app behavioral advertising in the EU can no longer be opt-in by default, marking the end of an era. The regulators won, at least for now.
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None of us are truly living off the grid
Xoilac tv là kênh xem bóng đá trực tiếp 24/7 phát sóng trực tiếp bóng đá hơn 20 giải đấu. Chất lượng hình ảnh HD 4K, tốc độ ổn định, xem ttbd trên mọi thiết bị.
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So Long, Twitter and Reddit
It's been over three years since my last blog post. I think that the website code started to feel like it had bitrotted, and so making new blog posts became onerous. But I've taken the time to redo this website using Zig , so it's quite easy to add blog posts now, and plus I added dark mode .
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No one wants simplicity
We think we do, but in fact every web developer will happily sacrifice simplicity to the first shiny thing promising them relief from the mildest of ailments.
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Against Automaticity
An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the “emotional inception” model of advertising, most “cognitive biases,” and any fiel…
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Growing share of Americans favor more nuclear power
About six-in-ten U.S. adults now say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, up from 43% in 2020.