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The Real Luxuries In Life
Labor Day weekend has always been the back to school marker for me. I'm 60, closing in on 61, and thinking a lot more about what I actually care about. Amy texted me a list yesterday.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
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The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire
Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize Trump voters
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EU to greenlight Chat Control tomorrow
[Update: Vote has been postponed to Thursday, keep up the pressure!] The Belgian EU Council presidency seems set to have bulk Chat Control searches of our private communications greenlighted by EU governments on Wednesday 19 Thursday 20 June. This confirms concerns that the proponents of Chat Con
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Why is LinkedIn so cringe?
The answer is in its business model and algorithm.
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ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
There's a lot more to replacing labor than just automating tasks
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There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
It's common knowledge that Android device tend to be more out of date than iOS devices, but what does this actually mean? Let’s look at android marketshare data to see how old devices in the wild are. The x axis of the plot below is date, and the y axis is Android marketshare. The share of all devices sums to 100%…
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This photograph is free
I've just read This photograph is not free on Petapixel.com, and I should explain why I disagree with the author and decided to give away the picture below: The photo above is
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Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless
Yesterday, June 15, 2026, a small and unimportant announcement appeared in Apple developer news: New domain for Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email. Long story short: now both Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email aliases are going to be issued on the @private.icloud.com subdomain. This makes it much easier to…
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Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
Last year I predicted there would be a significant (2008+) economic crash that year. The year is now 2026 and I was wrong. At the time my main argument was essentially this: The unemployment rate just follows these smooth curves, covid was an exception, and it was due to jump again. Not very scientific I […]
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Lobbying is corruption
On lobbying, corruption, and the same animal under two names
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The Internet Is a Surveillance State
Polish translation I’m going to start with three data points. One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks…
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Why I don't discuss politics with friends
March 2025
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Russia to legalize software piracy
my show is canceled, business news reports
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Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time
Originally designed as a decentralized ecosystem, the Web has undergone a significant centralization in recent years. In order to regain control over our digital self, over the digital aspects of our lives, we need to understand how we arrived at this point and how we can get back on track. This chapter explains the…
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How to live on $432 a month in America
(For All Expenses)
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Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
Reflections on autonomy and the value of thinking for ourselves
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It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is
The DMCA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998. It has a weird history. Its inception came from Bruce Lehmann, Microsoft's chief copyright enforcer, whom Clinton tapped to serve as his Copyright Czar. This was back in the "Information Superhighway" days, when Al Gore was holding hearings on the demilitarization…
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September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
How a Pole sees the world in September 2026: a scrolling essay that follows one closed strait into fuel, food, bonds, defence and demography.
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I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)
JD Stillwater, Science Ambassador's blog.
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Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years. On the contrary, one may even make the case that while efforts […] <a class="more-link"…
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Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
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Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
In 2012, I signed the Cost of Knowledge pledge, and stopped reviewing for, and publishing in, all Elsevier journals. In the four years since, I’ve adhered closely to this policy; with a coupl…
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My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie
I saw a doctor this week. Before the appointment, I was asked to sign a privacy policy consent form which started out this way
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