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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
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5G: The outsourced elephant in the room
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. In a break from the usual GPS/Galileo, DNA and C++ posts, here is a bit on 5G and national security. It turns out that through PowerDNS and its parent company Open-Xchange, we know a lot about how large scale European communication service…
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Kubernetes is our generation's Multics
Yesterday's post enumerated # blog-topics related to understanding and using shell. Today's post started out as a "grab bag" of other topics, but is now centered around problems with # distributed-systems .
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Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
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Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
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Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb
OverviewA long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to mo…
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“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”
This write-up was originally posted on reddit , though I've cleaned things up specifically for this post. Due to reasons discussed towards the end of this post, I'm not entirely happy with the results and intend to take another shot at it in the near future.
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Enough with the dead butterflies
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
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Being poor vs. being broke
The more I speak about being poor, the more I realize how fundamentally other folks misunderstand what it means to be poor versus being broke.
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Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
Or "Spiderman Is My Boyfriend"
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I Am Not A Number. In memory of the more than 72,000 Palestinians killed
In memory of the Palestinians killed in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
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Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
As I’ve posted before and many others have noted , there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.
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De-escalating social media conflict
Designing humility and forgiveness into social media products
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Death by AI
One man's struggle with his mortality.
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Web scraping for me, but not for thee
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to...
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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden.
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The Effectiveness of Publicly Shaming Bad Security
Here's how it normally plays out: It all begins when a company pops up online and makes some sort of ludicrous statement related to their security posture, often as part of a discussion on a public social media platform such as Twitter. Shortly thereafter, the masses descend on said
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Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired MediaWiki’s most influential developer and disbanded the team whose entire job…
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Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it…
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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press
Most websites can't tell you about them. But I can.
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24 year old student lights match: Europe versus Facebook
If you are interested in social networks, don't miss the slick video about Max Schrems’ David and Goliath struggle with Facebook over the way they are treating his personal information. Click on the red “CC” in the lower right-hand corner to see the English subtitles.
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The Post-American Internet
On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled " A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet " for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.
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The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
That's the problem with deploying play-acting as "solutions:" play-acting doesn't actually fix the problems at the source, it simply lets th...
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I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
A reaction and assorted observations about Apple's September 9 Awe-Dropping event.
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Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”