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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
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Felix "fx" Lindner has died
With heavy hearts, we announce that Felix “FX” Lindner —a cherished friend, and the founder and owner of Recurity Labs—passed away on 2026-03-01.
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Everybody Let's Stop the TPP: Share These Videos and Spread the Word
President Obama was scheduled to meet with the leaders of the other eleven countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Bali, supposedly to plan the “end-game” for this massive trade deal. However, he has made a...
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White House Doesn't Want You to Know the TPP's Effects on U.S. Copyright Laws
As the White House doubles down on its attempt to pass legislation to fast track secret trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, their oft-repeated refrain about these deals' digital copyright enforcement provisions is that these policies would not alter U.S. law. In a...
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Facebook announces new privacy and tagging model
Learn about Meta: our mission, principles, leadership, who owns the company, apps (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads) and products like Quest.
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American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression
In his 2004 book Perilous Times , Geoffrey R. Stone observes that with respect to free speech rights in wartime, “Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent, imprisoned and deported dissenters, and then—later—regretted their actions.” In reality, as the timeline below demonstrates, it is not simply American’s…
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Off-Facebook Activity Is a Welcome but Incomplete Move
Today Facebook announced the roll-out of its Off-Facebook Activity tool (initially introduced as “Clear History” nearly two years ago). The tools shows you a list of apps, websites, and businesses that Facebook knows you have visited through its business tools (including Facebook Login, Facebook’s...
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White House Source Code Policy a Big Win for Open Government
The U.S. White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering a new policy for sharing source code for software created by or for government projects. There’s a lot to love about the proposed policy: it would make it easier for people to find and reuse government software, and...
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Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping
Americans are having a record low amount of sex, especially young adults.
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Aadhaar isn’t progress – it’s dystopian and dangerous
Mitchell Baker and Ankit Gadgil: India should pause further roll out of Aadhaar until a law protecting individual security is passed.
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Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage linked to global farmland
The Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford brings together the best minds from different fields to tackle the most pressing issues of the 21st…
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Novelist warns against utilitarian trends in higher education
News, research, and insights from Stanford University.
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Google to France: We Won't Forget It for You Wholesale
In a move that could set a crucial precedent for all service providers, Google pushed back against the expansion of what's become known as the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) ruling, and refused to comply with a notice issued by French data protection agency Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et...
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2018 reform of EU data protection rules
Find out what your organisation must do to comply with the GDPR and learn how you can help individuals to exercise their data protection rights.
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Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary
Testimony before the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law
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Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4M/year on Reddit
The social networking platform Reddit relies on volunteer moderators to prevent the site from being overrun by problematic content—including hate speech—and ensure that it remains appealing for users. Though uncompensated, this labor is highly valuable to the company: According to a pair of new studies led by…
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Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults with Worse Mental Health (2023)
New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls
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Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo
Kinshasa—One hundred days have passed since the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared the ongoing Ebola outbreak, which has now become the country's fastest growing. Transmission is outpacing control efforts, requiring a substantial scale-up across all areas of response to halt the spread of the virus.
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Astronomers Witness a Dying Star Reach Its Explosive End
Haleakalā and Maunakea, Hawai ʻ i – For the very first time, astronomers have imaged in real time the dramatic end to a red supergiant’s life, watching the massive star’s rapid self-destruction and final death throes before it collapsed into a Type II supernova.
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Google will start warning Chinese users about problematic search terms
Over the past couple years, we’ve had a lot of feedback that Google Search from mainland China can be inconsistent and unreliable. It depend...
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Good News: Craigslist drops exclusive license to your posts
In a welcome course correction, craigslist has removed its short-lived provision that required users to grant it an exclusive license to--in other words granting them ownership of--every post. We were unhappily surprised to see this click-through demand, but are glad to see that craigslist has...
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Stakes Are High in Oracle v. Google, But the Public Has Already Lost
Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “...
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The UK's Proposed Spy Law Would Force Apple to Secretly Hack its Phones Too
The FBI's demand that Apple craft new software to bypass iOS's security protections has ignited a worldwide debate about a government's ability to force tech companies to sabotage their own security. One repeated question has been: will other countries, like China, demand the same powers? You don't...