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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 302 posts.
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The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40
In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic…
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Why Not to Use Quora
Forget about Quora's security breach. Their ongoing efforts to block access to their content, including a multi-year ban on the Internet Archive, are reason enough to never use them.
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The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
The personal website and blog of Daniel Long Sockwell, a lawyer-turned-programmer with an interest in web development, open source, and making things as simple as possible.
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A sad update about a scissors maker that went viral
Back in 2014, a lovely short film by Shaun Bloodworth called The Putter went viral. The film shows Cliff Denton making scissors for Ernest Wright & Sons. Denton
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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
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My experience with Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine
Translator and proofreader’s note: There are large parts of this document that don’t parse well either from Chinese or from Naomi’s written…
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Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags
Surveillance capitalism sucks: it improves the scattershot, low-performance success-rate of untargeted advertising (well below 1 percent) and doubles or triples it (to well below 1 percent!).
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The Internet of Unprofitable Things
Gather 'round children. Uncle Andrew wants to tell you a festive story. The NTPmare shortly after Christmas
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Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)
BitTorrent used to dominate not just piracy, but the internet. Now, it’s barely noticed in traffic studies. What happened to the platform?
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Bitcoin is a Cult
The Bitcoin community has changed greatly over the years; from technophiles that could explain a Merkle tree in their sleep, to speculators driven by the desire for a quick profit & blockchain startups seeking billion dollar valuations led by people who don’t even know what a Merkle tree is. As the years have gone on…
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How Does Mastodon Work?
I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.
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GDPR – A Practical Guide for Developers (2017)
You’ve probably heard about GDPR. The new European data protection regulation that applies practically to everyone. Especially if you are working in a big company, it’s most likely that there’sContinue reading
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Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your goin…
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Mark Felt-Tipped: Uncovering top-secret information by counting pixels
KEMUDITOTO merupakan official Situs Togel 4D & Toto TOGEL ONLINE Terjamin Maxwin dengan akses cepat, pilihan permainan lengkap, layanan responsif, dan nyaman digunakan setiap hari.
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A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no…
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The Price of Free Is Actually Too High
I loved this quote by Tristan Harris in the New York Magazine article The Internet Apologizes … “We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too
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