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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,069 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
Mozilla and independent researchers publish guidelines for an ad archive API
On March 28 — after urging from dozens of civil society organizations — Facebook is set to launch its advertising archive API. This tool is intended to provide researchers, journalists, and users with transparency into political ads and audience targeting on Facebook.
If your bank doesn’t like your startup’s blog, they may freeze your funds
Update: The Fabulis story had legs like I’ve never seen before. When I posted it to Hacker News it shot to number 1 in about 3 minutes and stayed there for 6 to 8 hours. A few hours later Robin Wauters from Techcrunch picked up on the story and since then it’s appeared everywhere from GigaOm and ValleyWag to FT.com …
The ICANN Public Comments on WHOIS Privacy
ICANN is currently considering a proposal that “domains used for online financial transactions for commercial purpose should be ineligible for [WHOIS] privacy and proxy registrations” [ PDF ]. Given the vagueness around what would count as “commercial purpose” (tip jars? advertising? promoting your Kickstarter?) and…
Mapping hospital accessibility with OpenStreetMap
Using OpenStreetMap data to craft a self-hosted interactive map of hospital accessibility in Virginia.
Exposing the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht Im Internet (CUII)
A private organization controlling what websites to block in Germany-without courts, without transparency.
EFF: Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary
Co-authored by Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment — but that doesn't help if the censorship doesn't come from the government. The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun...
Another Piece of the Stuxnet Puzzle
We can now conclusively link Stuxnet to the centrifuge structure at the Natanz nuclear enrichment lab in Iran. Watch this new video presentation from Ralph Langner, the researcher who has done the most work on Stuxnet. It’s a long clip, but the good stuff is between 21:00 and 29:00. The pictures he’s referring to are…
My Resignation from Freenode
As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much…
Congress Needs to End Warrantless Spying, Not Make It Permanent
Lawmakers are getting serious about renewing the U.S. government’s Internet spying powers, so we need to get serious about stopping their bad proposals. First out of the gate is a bill from Sen. Tom Cotton, an ardent defender of government surveillance. His bill would not just reauthorize, but make...
Taleb is wrong about IQ
Investigation of Talebs claims about IQ using real data.
Futarchy: Robin Hanson on prediction markets
Transcript of interview
A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
If you're still using this page, please email me at [email protected] and I'll send you a copy.
Our World in Data: Suicide
Suicide rates can be reduced with greater understanding and support for people at risk.
There’s a simple alternative to the current web
Via @roundtrip, this conversation from July: There’s actually a pretty simple alternative to the current web. In federated wiki, when you find a page you like, you curate it to your own serve…
ChatGPT is biased against resumes with credentials that imply a disability
UW researchers found that ChatGPT consistently ranked resumes with disability-related honors and credentials — such as the “Tom Wilson Disability Leadership Awa
Work from Home and Productivity
We study productivity before and during the working from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic, using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company. Hours worked increased, including a rise of 18% outside normal business hours. Average output declined…
On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results
As most people are aware, Google search results are constantly changing and evolving. In the past couple of years, there has been a conscious and very deliberate shift – and not just by Googl…
Battersea Power Station in London unveils the newly restored Control Room A
⦁ Battersea Power Station has revealed the fully restored Control Room A, the first of the Grade II* listed building’s two original Control Rooms which
The code that controls our money
COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.
Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
You've been visited by St. Ignucious. Upvote for success in FOSS
Not Buying American Anymore
I feel like I need to first defuse any idea of antagonizing Americans themselves. The people are never to blame. This isn't a post criticizing the American people, it's criticizing the state of things that makes it impractical to have any sort of economical relation with the country if you are an average Joe like me.
Seattle: Highest Minimum Wage, Lowest Unemployment Rate
Doomsayers Keep Getting It Wrong on Higher Minimum Wages In Seattle, unemployment has fallen and business has boomed since the city raised its pay floor. Bloomberg, October 21, 2016 In 2014, Seattle passed an ordinance to eventually raise the minimum wage in the city to $15 an hour, giving the Pacific Northwest…
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…
Microsoft Statement on TikTok
ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft. We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests. To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for…
The App Store was always authoritarian
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…