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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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L.A.'s Lost Transit
For many, Los Angeles embodies car-culture—and the suburban-style development, freeways, traffic jams, and pollution that go with it. But it didn’t have to be that way. Turns out, LA was never designed to be a car city.
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DNA testing company vanishes along with its customers' genetic data
Atlas Biomed, a DNA testing company that promised clients insights into their genetic disposition has suddenly disappeared.
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Models all the way down
LAION-5B is an open-source foundation dataset. It contains 5.8 billion image and text pairs—a size too large to make sense of. We follow the construction of the dataset to better understand its contents, implications and entanglements.
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How Filipino WWII Soldiers Were Written Out of History
How hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers fought in the U.S. military and helped win World War II. And how history -- and the American government -- forgot them.
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Research Finds Tipping Point for Large-Scale Social Change
This tipping point — roughly 25% of people — applies to any kind of movement or initiative.
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UK Online Safety Bill threatens encryption, secure communication, and reporting
Does the image above, depicting the rescue of a child who attempted to reach the U.K. by sea, present the act of immigration in “a positive light”? It’s an absurd question, of course. It’s journalism – an effort to convey in visual terms the stark truth that tens of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers try to…
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Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
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Open Letter From UK Security Researchers
Dear Reader, The first set of publications based on Edward Snowden’s files were concerned with surveillance of internet communication h...
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The end of Roe will bring about a sea change in the encryption debate
With the Supreme Court poised to rip away a constitutional right that’s been the law of the land for nearly half a century by overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s time for the gloves to come off in the encryption debate. For a quarter of a century, it has
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USPS Discrimination Against Atheism? A Study by Atheist Shoes (2013)
Stupendously comfortable handmade shoes, inspired by the minimalist aesthetic of the Bauhaus and crafted from the finest leathers known to humanity. Designed in Berlin, and handmade in Porto, all our materials are sourced in Europe (Germany, the Netherlands & Portugal).
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1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets
1100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets from 1956 on the interactive NukeMap. Choose a city and a bomb size, and detonate. See what happens.
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Shouldn't Robots Be Doing My Taxes By Now?
Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants…
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If you travel to China, be aware of an exit ban
China Exit Bans: Understanding the Risks. Learn about the use of exit bans in China and what you can do to mitigate the risks. Get expert insights.
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Mexico seeks to solidify rank as top U.S. trade partner, push further past China
Mexico's emergence followed fractious U.S. relations with China, which had moved past Canada to claim the top trading spot in 2014. The dynamic changed in 2018 when the U.S. imposed tariffs on China’s goods and with subsequent pandemic-era supply-chain disruptions that altered international trade and investment flows…
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Social media bots often tweet fake health claims about cannabis: study
USC researchers analyzed thousands of tweets and found that social bots frequently shared false information about cannabis’s health benefits.
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Apple’s renewable energy projects are helping to create 1.2GW of clean power
Apple’s newly completed renewable projects are bringing clean energy to local communities while reducing carbon emissions.
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Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive
Amidst the speculative boom for NFTs and crypto-currencies, one decentralized technology foundation is taking the long view by investing in deep history and the far future. Today, the Filecoin Foundation announced a 50,000 FIL grant to the Internet Archive - the largest single donation in the digital library’s 25-year…
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Internet uptake has accelerated during the pandemic
ITU’s Measuring digital development: Facts and figures 2021 offers a snapshot of the most important ICT indicators, including estimates for the current year.
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Shooting an Elephant (1936)
"[…] it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
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How healthy is the internet?
With over two decades of global impact, Mozilla Foundation continues to lead the movement for a better technology future—powered by people, open by design, and fueled by imagination.
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MIRI's Approach – Machine Intelligence Research Institute
MIRI's mission is "to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact." How can we ensure any such thing? It's a