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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 13,067 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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The right to use adblockers
Companies increasingly aim to control how users interact with their content online, threatening user freedom. As more companies crack down on browser exten...
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Download responsibly
This month we’ve ramped up the infrastructure behind the download server, and downloads should now be available earlier and faster. There’s also a small technical change in that requests for a “…latest” file will now be answered with a HTTP redirect to the specific latest version (see previous blog post).
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Our Newfound Fear of Risk
We’re afraid of risk. It’s a normal part of life, but we’re increasingly unwilling to accept it at any level. So we turn to technology to protect us. The problem is that technological security measures aren’t free. They cost money, of course, but they cost other things as well. They often don’t provide the security…
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Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
FISA Reform §702 Is a Threat to Democracy At Home and Abroad.
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MrBeast Failed to Disclose Ads and Improperly Collected Children's Data
The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) recommended MrBeast update advertising and data collection practices.
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Thousands dead, millions deprived of civil liberties? (2001)
If we are not careful, the deadly attacks on New York and Washington will lead to far worse secondary damage, if the U.S. Congress adopts "preventive measures" that take away the freedom that America stands for.
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NSA Spying Documents to be Released As Result of EFF Lawsuit
In a major victory in one of EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, the Justice Department conceded yesterday that it will release hundreds of pages of documents, including FISA court opinions, related to the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law...
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How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
At FeeFighters, we’re constantly on conference calls with other companies. We’re a scrappy startup, so we use free services when we can. I’ve been using a free conference call line from freeeconferencecall.com for the past year, and wondering – how is it free? I chose freeconferencecall because they
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Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)
These tiny insects kill more than 1,000,000 people every year
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Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
The unfortunately botched economics of emergency care
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Your New Medical Credit Score Could Deny You Care
There is now a number, that you can't see, that follows you wherever you go.
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LSD: Not Even Once
Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. […] – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple
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Privilege is bad grammar
When I got my first real job, I used to get so nervous about writing emails to my boss. I would run spellcheck, triple-check the grammar, read over it again ...
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Invasive, secretive “bossware” tracking workers
COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country.The services often sound relatively innocuous. Some vendors bill their tools as “automatic time tracking”...
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How Instagram closed my account and gave it to a football celebrity
My name is Andrés Iniesta and my only mistake was having the exact name and last name as a famous football player.
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Over-regulation is doubling the cost
After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit, I made the jump to hardware. Now I’m working on carbon removal + steel at Charm Industrial , and electric long-haul trucking with Revoy . It’s epically fun to be building in the real world, but little did I expect that more than half the cost of…
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Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source
There is a new development that directly impacts the open source community, and it warrants a new commentary. Angry maintainers have started adding code to a small number of open source repositorie…
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We’re no longer naming suspects in minor crime stories
AP will no longer name suspects in minor crime stories, which we sometimes cover and pick up from member news organizations as one-off briefs because they are "odd" and of interest to our customers.
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Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
Sometimes the law is not the law
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The Internet Has a Rat Poison Problem
How online sales of highly regulated, super-toxic rodenticides exploit gaps in the law and imperil wildlife.
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The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
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The end of the level playing field
I am old enough to remember the gogo days of cable TV when entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new cable channel would go, hat in hand and cap table in tow, to the big cable companies and beg to get distribution on their networks. When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we […]
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Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
Here is a short and curious Twitter thread from app developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry: Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an iCloud account. Meaning, Apple’s…