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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,068 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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To Delete Facebook or Not to Delete Facebook? That Is Not the Question
Since the Cambridge Analytica news hit headlines, calls for users to ditch the platform have picked up speed. Whether or not it has a critical impact on the company’s user base or bottom line, the message from #DeleteFacebook is clear: users are fed up. EFF is not here to tell you whether or not to...
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Ego Death
Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.
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Steve Pavlina: 30 days since I quit Facebook
It’s been about 30 days since I quit Facebook , so I wanted to share an update on what that’s been like. Many others also quit the service last month, and many more are on the fence as to whether they should do the same.
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The Hierarchy of Money
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
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The Hobby Computer Culture
[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of …
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The Siege of Carrie Lam
On September 26, 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam held her first listening session after seventeen weeks of protest. Her government, which had spent the summer nearly incommunicado, had settled on these encounters as a way to heal social divisions and identify the mysterious goals of a movement whose five…
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How the NSA obtains and uses airline reservations (2013)
A front-page report in today’s New York Times based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirms that the NSA, like the DHS, uses airline reservation data as part of its profiling and social network analysis of US citizens and foreigners. Today’s report also raises new questions, and suggests some…
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How a Political Engineering Firm Exposed Their Code Base
Political data firm AggregateIQ exposed IT assets that raise questions for society about how technology is being used in recent US political history.
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The Whitehouse’s New Executive Order on Cyber Crime Is (Unfortunately) No Joke
On the morning of April 1st, the White House issued a new executive order (EO) that asserts that malicious “cyber-enabled activities” are a national threat, declares a national emergency, and establishes sanctions and other consequences for individuals and entities. While computer and information...
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Tools for thought as cultural practices, not computational objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
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Hellbanned from Hacker News
Yesterday I submitted a post on Hacker News out of frustration at moderators pedantically changing post titles. After quickly rising to the number two spot on the front page with 482 points and 37 comments, the post was deleted by a moderator, presumably the operator of the site, Paul Graham.
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Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project
OSM US is incredibly excited to announce the latest Charter Project: OldInsuranceMaps.net (OIM)!If you’re a map nerd you’ll remember ever seeing a Sanborn Insurance Map in person. They often come in absolute...
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EFF Review of Verizon and Google's Net Neutrality Proposal
Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will cause more harm than good for the Internet. The worst case scenario would be that, in allowing the FCC to regulate the Internet, we open...
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Why does Britain feel so poor?
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
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On paying for software
The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…
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California updates laws around salary and criminal histories of job applicants
California has updated its labor laws around the salary and criminal histories of job applicants. Find out how to stay compliant.
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The Khmer Rouge: Genocide in the Name of Utopia (2016)
How is history used to support ideology? Is violence by a government against its own civilian population ever justified? Why are certain events given priority over others in history books? This les…
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After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done with the Full-Time Work
Amidst 130,000 tech layoffs, 62% of knowledge workers say they don’t feel secure committing to one employer anymore.
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Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME
With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our users can continue to access all content the…
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An Idea for the Economy that will Freak Out a lot of People
The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield . In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can. The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money. That’s a premise that should make the…
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Wikipedia bans agenda-driven editor, but punishes the messenger too
A look at a Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign to discredit anti-war campaigners and journalists
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Stanford CS enrollment increase "downright scary"
Eric Roberts just sent out a note of concern to the ACM Education Council, and he kindly allowed me to share it here as a guest post. When I read his note, I thought about my May 2009 CACM column …
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