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On incels, dead bedrooms and the hard problems of loneliness
My father’s father was by all accounts a really bitter-hearted sort of person.
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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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Reasons not to use Uber
Uber donated a million dollars to the corrupter's inaugural celebration. This is the moral equivalent of a bribe.
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How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
Although this article isn’t related to any of the 12 Challenges so far, it’s on a subject I’m developing for a potential future challenge.
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Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids
Today, when my 1.9-year-old daughter tried to grab and eat an unwashed orange, I asked her to give it to me so I could wash and peel it if she could wait for a moment. She did. It got me thinking about the marshmallow experiment, where the idea was that patience equals success. But … […]
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Google Engineer bails out student in jail
The whole experience of what happens pre-trial was a real eye-opener. One of the things which I learned was that if one uses a bail bondsman in the US they require a 10% payment which they keep even if you do show up for court. That makes getting out of jail phenomenally expensive.
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Kitsault, Canada’s $50M 1980s ghost town
It sounds made up. In the wilderness of British Columbia, a two hour drive from any town with cell reception, sits a ghost town. Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50…
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Members of Congress Go Silent Over Prior False Testimony On Surveillance
The Republican and Democratic parties have achieved a bipartisan purpose in uniting against the public’s need to know about massive surveillance programs and the need to redefine privacy in a…
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Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief
Disguising self-interest as virtue
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Bye, Bye, Google
I spent this past weekend de-Google-ifying my life and, despite my expectations, it wasn't too hard to do.
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I don't want streaming music, I just want to stream my music
I don't want your streaming music service, I just want the music I've collected and care about available to stream.
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Today I Briefed Congress on the NSA
This morning, I spent an hour in a closed room with six members of Congress: Rep. Lofgren, Rep. Sensenbrenner, Rep. Bobby Scott, Rep. Goodlatte, Rep. Mike Thompson, and Rep. Amash. No staffers, no public: just them. Lofgren had asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn’t…
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Bulgaria Passes a Law Requiring Open Source
Less than two years after my presentation titled “Open source for the government”, and almost exactly one year after I became advisor to…
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Please commit more blatant academic fraud
This week, I was thrilled to read about the first well-documented case of explicit academic fraud in the artificial intelligence community. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend, and that other researchers will be inspired by their example and follow up by engaging in even more blatant...
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Unicode Dicks
One of the things that has always slightly amused and puzzled me is that unicode lacks a "cock" glyph. I mean, it seems to have characters a...
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An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
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Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
A lot of people are watching the spectacle of Apple vs. the FBI and the Homeland Security Theatre and rubbing their eyes, wondering why Apple (in the person of CEO Tim Cook) is suddenly the knight in shining armour on the side of consumer privacy and civil rights. Apple, after all, is a goliath-sized corporate…
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One of the Most Alarming Internet Proposals I've Seen
Previous: Warning: Network Solutions' Moronic Alert Email That Masquerades as a Phishing Attack
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The world needs a non-profit search engine
Sometimes I forget why I’ve taken on this crazy, huge task. Why am I building a search engine ? Will it really be better than Google one day? Will people support it? Will people even use it?
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Never Trust Facebook
I stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but I didn’t want to remove my account and have no visibility on how or what Facebook might be showing about me or someone using my name. So I decide…
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Discord is not an acceptable choice for free software projects
It’s simple: free software projects should not use Discord. (This goes equally for any sort of public interest group.) Here’s why. TL;DR: Standardizing on…