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Avoid the Apple App Store
Have you ever though about building an iOS app? I did, but I now wish that I hadn’t.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Here comes the first TikTok war
Russia's invasion of Ukraine will be captured in incredible detail by smartphones and social media. This changes everything.
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A Failure, but Not of Prediction
I. Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This rai…
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Reasons not to use Skype (2012)
As of August, 2025, Skype no longer exists as a dis-service for actual use. However, this information about how it was unjust while it operated may still be interesting for comparison with other online dis-services and for understanding the wrongs that they often do to users.
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Bye, Gemini
The Gemini protocol was a big part of my COVID-19 lockdown experience. Discovering this underground, small protocol, having long discussions on the mailing list, and most importantly for me, developing software. My terminal Gemini browser, Amfora, was my first public FOSS project, something actually intended for a…
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Facebook is other people
This is what "democratization" looks like
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Moscow Publishes Photocopies of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Secret Protocols
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
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When Pepsi Had a Navy
In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily th…
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Tales from Prediction Markets
Prediction markets are fun, at least if you're making money.
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I Hate the News (2006)
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
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You are the scariest monster in the woods
We shouldn’t worry about AI destroying society because there’s something scarier out there (it’s us)
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Where Warren’s Wrong
Senator Warren’s proposal about how to regulate tech is wrong about history, the source of tech giant’s power, and the fundamental nature of technology itself. That doesn’t mean t…
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On the destruction of America’s best high school
[C]hildren with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “eli…
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The reason Facebook won’t ever change
Facebook’s (much deserved) media nightmare continued this week when it came under criticism for spamming members who signed up for two-factor authentication. This was followed by charges that its P…
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The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
(Note: although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, it may make sense to think of it as Part Two of a series, beginning with The Rise of the Access Economy.) There’s a classic exercise…
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Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
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Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
Scaling the WhatsApp online-status hack from a single contact to 5000 random phone numbers — what the data says about phone usage habits.
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I paid for Spotify playlist placements so you don’t have to
As part of my ongoing mission to throw money into thin air I decided to promote some of Corserine’s songs on Spotify. Objectives: increase monthly streams on my Spotify artist page so I can g…
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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser
In Denmark it is possible to register domains with funny characters such as æ, ø and å. And we do. One prominent example is our national portal for booking Covid-19 tests at https://coronaprøver.dk . Wikipedia calls these beasts Internationalised domain names , so they must indeed exist.
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More on the NSA Commandeering the Internet
If there’s any confirmation that the U.S. government has commandeered the Internet for worldwide surveillance, it is what happened with Lavabit earlier this month. Lavabit is—well, was—an e-mail service that offered more privacy than the typical large-Internet-corporation services that most of us use. It was a small…
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Kakizome: Japanese way of new-years resolution
Kakizome, Japanese way of new-years resolution
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UK chemist on Elsevier's ban on textmining
This is the first post of probably several in my concern about textmining. You do NOT have to be a scientist to understand the point with total clarity. This topic is one of the most important I have written about this year. We are at a critical point where unless we take action our scholarly rights will be further…
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Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
People in the bitcoin community often make fun of me as a nocoiner . That is, I don't have any bitcoins and am vocal about that fact. (Ne...
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