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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Georgia: Why so many counties?
When the Romans came to Great Britain, they built a bunch of forts called castra, which was Anglicized to chester. So, English cities whose names end in -chester, -caster and -cester were once Roma…
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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
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Automakers Say You Don’t Really Own Your Car
EFF is fighting for vehicle owners’ rights to inspect the code that runs their vehicles and to repair and modify their vehicles, or have a mechanic of their choice do the work. At the moment, the anti-circumvention prohibition in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act arguably restricts vehicle...
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Leaked TPP Investment Chapter Reveals Serious Threat to User Safeguards
A newly leaked chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement from Wikileaks has confirmed some of our worst fears about the agreement. The latest provisions would enable multinational corporations to undermine public interest rules through an international tribunal process called...
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Flickr now offers Public Domain and CC0 designations
Starting today, Flickr is happy to support Public Domain and Creative Commons 0 (CC0) works on our site.
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Farewell From Shari Steele
Today is the start of my last week as an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I will be leaving after nearly 15 years as EFF's President and Executive Director, having started as a Staff Attorney back in 1992. As I wrap up things here, I've been thinking a lot about where we've been...
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Cycling Lessons Learned from Amsterdam
Cycling Lessons Learned From Amsterdam That No One Talks About This post originally appears on Spacing Vancouver. By Darren Proulx and Samuel Baron I recently had the honour of visiting Amsterdam. …
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Who makes minimum wage?
Perhaps surprisingly, not very many people earn minimum wage, and they make up a smaller share of the workforce than they used to.
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The Invention of the Baby Carrot
Baby carrots are just regular carrots cut up and polished down. They're also the biggest thing to happen to carrots since orange. How did it happen?
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Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
In my February 23 blog post, I gave a brief overview of how search engines have evolved over the years and how today’s search engines learn from past searches to anticipate which results will be mo…
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By 2029 no computer or “machine intelligence” will have passed the Turing Test
will go to The Electronic Frontier Foundation if Kapor wins, or The Kurzweil Foundation if Kurzweil wins.
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Parents with annual family incomes below $125,000 will pay no tuition
News, research, and insights from Stanford University.
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EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)
Since late 2004, EFF has been warning the public about "printer dots" -- tiny yellow dots that appear on documents produced by many color laser printers and copiers. These yellow dots form a coded pattern on every page the printer produces and can be used to identify specific details about a...
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How the New York Times keeps tragedies ad-free
I was looking at the HTML source of a recent New York Times story about a tragic plane accident—150 people feared dead—and noticed this meta tag in its head:
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Amtrak police use of passenger data
[Passenger Name Record (PNR) view from Amtrak “Police GUI”. Click image for larger version.]
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The decline in unionization has fed the rise in incomes at the top
The decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the top
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Why We Should Demand a Shorter Workweek
I.W.W. Poster By Dustin Guastella If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. – K. Marx Recently a Chicago firm made headlines when it was revealed that they allowed their workers less than six minutes a day in the bathroom. Naturally, people were outraged, but this is an old…
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I Gave My Child Autism
This website is for sale! backfromnature.org is your first and best source for information about backfromnature. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
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Important Allies Join the Fight Against NSA Internet Backbone Surveillance
Last week, the ACLU filed a welcome additional challenge to the NSA’s warrantless Internet backbone surveillance (aka “Upstream” surveillance) on behalf of Wikimedia and a number of other media and human rights organizations. We applaud all of those involved in bringing the case. It adds another...
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Right Is The New Left
[Content warning: some ideas that might make you feel anxious about your political beliefs. Epistemic status: very speculative and not necessarily endorsed. This post is less something I will defen…
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We are under attack
Fighting censorship with technology since 2011. We use AI to monitor censorship and expand free speech worldwide.