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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
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The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
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100% User-Supported
If you want to build principled software, avoid becoming VCware. Stay user-supported. It is now possible for tiny teams to build principled software that mil...
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Jerk
If you’d like, you can listen to an audio version of this page. It includes all the contextually relevant bits of music, and a few ad libs not included in the text. But it doesn’t include the links and images, naturally.
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The entire crypto ecosystem is a ponzi
Not really. As a counter example, gold is clear and very old ponzi. It's ok. And as a more general argument, crypto does have utility. For circumventing capital controls, buying drugs or laundering money. So there will be constant supply of new depositors who needs that and willing to pay. I would not bet on crypto…
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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4
This is part 4 of an intermittent yet always enjoyable series: • Part 1: the rise of the ancient Puebloan civilization in the American Southwest from 10,000 BC to 750 AD. • Part 2: the rise and col…
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The curious economics of being ripped off on holiday
I once wrote that there are two types of charges: the ones you see coming and the ones you don’t. Perhaps I was too reductive. There’s a third category: the fees that you know are looming, but the …
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My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian
Two years ago, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum. As I learned more about myself and the way my brain worked, I started to look at past experiences through the lens of this newly-found…
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Mergers ruin everything
Bad merger policy is why wealth and power is so consolidated in America. But last month, two government enforcers started to turn the table on the monopolies who run our economy.
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The Patent Protection Racket
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have …
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Against Facebook
On the commodification of attention, the abuses of unpaid microwork and strategies of resistance.
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Wading Through AccuWeather’s Response
AccuWeather issued a statement regarding the controversy over their app sending location-identifying information to a monetization firm. It’s a veritable mountain of horseshit
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Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
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Lobbying
Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept?
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The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership
How did the company that aspired to be so much more come to this?
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Who wants to be tracked?
“We value your privacy…”, the clichéd beginning of many a privacy notice. I legitimately do value my own online privacy, and whenever I read that phrase as part of a website consent banner it sounds like lip service at best. Consent banners ostensibly exist to give users control over their data & personal privacy. Far…
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Are We Watching the Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual
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