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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.
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A Secretly Detained American Has Asked for a Lawyer – But Gov Won’t Give Him One
An American being held without charges by the U.S. military in Iraq has asked for an attorney, the ACLU finally learned last night following an extraordinary court hearing . The government is resisting our efforts to make contact with the man so he can challenge his detention, in an outrageous violation of the basic…
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Atherton spent $145K to delay train electrification. The rest of us paid $400M
The Town of Atherton's lawsuit against Caltrain electrification is the clearest case study we have of how a tiny, wealthy minority can hijack a…
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Privacy for Students: Surveillance Self-Defense
Schools are increasingly adopting surveillance technology to spy on students while they’re at school, at home, or even on their social media. The companies that make these surveillance products and services advertise them to schools as a way to keep students safe–but there’s no evidence so far that they actually...
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Nóirín Plunkett has died
It is with great sadness that the Foundation and its members were notified about the sudden passing of Nóirín Plunkett.
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The Wayback Machine: Fighting Digital Extinction in New Ways
Extinction isn’t just a biological issue. In the 21st century, it’s a technical, even digital one, too. The average web page might last three months before it’s altered or deleted forever. You never know when access to the information on these web pages is going to be needed. It might be three months from now;
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Study finds increased possibility of information leaking around Fed meetings
Booth study finds increased possibility of information leaking around Fed meetings
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Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair
Recently equity-minded education reformers in New York City have been trying to curtail “gifted and talented programs,” saying they “do not condone a
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Notes on Nationalism (1945)
"By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'."
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Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout
If you are reading this then you most likely know about the recent news from reddit. As a result of these events, Lemmy has grown immensely in the last two weeks. The number of monthly active users has increased over 25 times, from 1.000 to 27.000 at time of writing. Suddenly Lemmy has become one of the largest…
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Looking ahead for WhatsApp
Today, we’re updating WhatsApp’s terms and privacy policy for the first time in four years, as part of our plans to test ways for people to communicate with businesses in the months ahead. The updated documents also reflect that we’ve joined Facebook and that we've recently rolled out many new features, like…
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’Brain rot‘ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024
After more than 37,000 votes on our shortlist, we're pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is 'brain rot'.
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The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
Why and how the UK Coronavirus Dashboard team built their analytics service on top of PostgreSQL & Citus on Azure.
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The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)
will go to Bletchly Park Trust if Keith wins, or The Internet Archive if Haughey wins.
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EFF, CloudFlare Asks Court Not to Force the Internet to Enforce Trademarks
This month, CloudFlare and EFF pushed back against major music labels’ latest strategy to force Internet infrastructure companies like CloudFlare to become trademark and copyright enforcers, by challenging a broad court order that the labels obtained in secret. Unfortunately, the court denied...
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Court has confirmed coordinated raids of Zwiebelfreunde in Germany were illegal
Update July 10th: Last week Monday, prosecution stated that they will keep our things for further analysis, even after explicitly confirming to journalists that they are aware that our only connection to Riseup is the collection of donations. This includes items belonging to our partners, and other third parties like…
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The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
Paul Graham's Hacker News is a great website to find interesting programming links and sane discussion. The site reflects a sort of post- Reddit sensibility; the design of HN was directly intended to address the shortcomings of programming.reddit.com from someone very much on the inside (Reddit was a Paul Graham Y…
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No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
The risks and harms associated with drinking alcohol have been systematically evaluated over the years and are well documented. The World Health Organization has now published a statement in The Lancet Public Health: when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.
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An Experience with Modafinil
An Experience with Modafinil. 'Caffeine's Smarter Sibling' by Medifinil
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6M Acres of Public Land in the US West Are Corner-Locked
Read the onX report on corner locked land to learn how much land is involved, the concerns of affected property owners, and what can be done to solve this issue.