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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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macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions
This is a follow-up to my blog post Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain . In the addendum to that blog post, I discussed a workaround, which was to delete my WiFi password right before rebooting into the updater. In a trial run on my M1 Mac mini, the workaround was successful.
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Browser diversity starts with us
Developers, designers, and strategists, here’s something you can do for the health of the web:
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Elsevier steps up its War On Access
I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to…
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The piracy paradox at Udemy (2015)
My Pluralsight courses get pirated all the time. I used to have Google alerts for them but frankly, the flood of emails I’d get each day just didn’t justify the “return” I’d get by forwarding them on to the Pluralsight piracy folks. I ended up rationalising it
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Edge of the Creative Commons (2013)
As you may or may not be aware, last year I left TV Tropes (TVT) on unfriendly terms. I may have been banned, but the feeling was certainl...
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We built a secret apartment in the mall (2007)
Starting in 2003 I committed to the idea of creating a luxury apartment in the mall. Over the course of the years to come I systematically coordinated the movement of the core elements that start to define a home. The space in the mall achieved a base-level of comfort, with enough amenities to qualify itself as a…
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Who controls your computer? and how to make sure it's you
Can you trust your computer? Can you control what it does and doesn’t? Or is someone else in control? How can you even know what it is or isn’t doing? Even if it tells you, how do you know it’s not lying? As computing systems become more complex, how can “Trusted Computing” be achieved, not (just) by big corporations…
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The Death of NYC Congestion Pricing
And What is Says About the Institutional Problems in American Cities & Infrastructure
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Web 3 is Flawed
My opinions on Web3 and why it is flawed
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Hacker News – The Good Parts
The other day, my twelve-year-old daughter asked me what platform I spend most of my time on when I'm on my phone or computer. She intuitively noticed that ...
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The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
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Three Six Mafia – Data about "6/6/6 dating" (2024)
Most guys my age have "the chat". The one with your college buddies that only exists to share memes, argue, bully, and occasionally announce that you got a promotion or had a kid. I am like most guys.
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Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)
Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
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Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic
I recently read End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. It's an excellent book and I highly recommend that everyone read it. Tech oligarchs make up an important component of the end-times-fascist coalition. One thing that stood out
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Last gasps of the rent seeking class?
Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on…
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The Price-Fixing Economy
New information coming to light in Amazon and meat price-fixing antitrust cases shows inflation is probably being driven by consolidation in the form of data sharing.
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Amazon Has an Honesty Issue
We recently ordered a high-value item from Amazon (for Prime delivery), but it was stolen from within their delivery chain. Amazon initially accepted that there was an issue but have staunchly tried t
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Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News?
As I was walking around Osaka with Sacha , we started talking about Hacker News and how there seem to be a lot of popular stories about Japan.
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An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
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A skeptical response to Musk's hyperloop
There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish…
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