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Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours
Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and no…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Nigerian Teens Are Making Sci-Fi Shorts with Slick Visual Effects
For the past year, a group of teens in Nigeria called the Critics Company have been uploading short sci-fi films to their YouTube channel. Using a smartphone wi
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Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
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Reasons Not to Use Apple (2018)
Apple reportedly had objections to what Jon Stewart said in his video program — it canceled the show after he had criticized China, and something the article describes as "AI". (It could be that what he criticized was actually large language models, which may be an important issue but are not "intelligence" .)
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Google's Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
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Attorney General Barr and Encryption
Last month, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy—what is commonly known as “going dark.” Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically…
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No more XS4ALL is unthinkable
They are the example of how it should be, the Dutch ISP called XS4ALL. They were bought in '98 by the former state-owned KPN, but continued to operate independently. Born from a group of hackers and the first ISP in the Netherlands, today they are still the example that we measure other ISPs by.
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People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017)
Selections from the Washington Post's Gilded Age coverage of notable visitors to the city
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Senate Testimony on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy
Idle Words > Talks > Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy (Senate hearing)
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Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway
I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...
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An Honest Living
What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition.
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Make More Land
We used to make land. We built long wharves for docking ships, and then over time filled in the areas between them. Later we built up mudflats wholesale to make even larger areas. Here's a map of Boston showing how much of the land wasn't previously dry: (Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map &…
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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning…
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ProtonMail Voluntarily Offers Assistance for Real-Time Surveillance?
Proton Mail disputed some of the content of the post originally published at this location. We will continue the discussion directly with Proton Mail, in particular at a meeting in …
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RIP Culture War Thread
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can’t comment, please say so on the subreddit.] I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him Several yea…
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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
Follow up: Cloudflare: Making the internet a little bit faster – for a select group of people CloudFlare is a very helpful service if you are a website owner and don’t want to deal with separate…
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Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
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Microsoft Advertisement Inc.
Advertisement needs to end. It is insane to think that a piece of software, so fundamental to running computers, an operating system is selling user behavior to advertisers.
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Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email
In November 2017, I deactivated my account on Facebook. I didn’t leave Facebook for moral reasons back then but more because it was starting to feel like a waste of time and valuable brain cy…
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I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
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Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017)
UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse
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