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Society, Policy & Culture

The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.

Any year
122

Careless People

I never would have read Careless People , Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:

126

OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

I was a contributor for OpenStreetMap for a long time, and I advocated for OpenStreetMap for a long time, but the project has stalled while the proprietary mapping world has continued to improve in data quality. For those of us who care about Free and Open data, this is a problem. In this article, I explore the…

133

Hacker News Parody Thread (2013)

This page is intended to be a humorous parody of Hacker News . It is not in any way affiliated with Hacker News. The page's theme and layout are based on the original site. The usernames (with two exceptions) are intended to be fictitious.

135

Google is dead. Where do we go now?

It’s anecdotal, I know, but my main entertainment business revenue is down 50% over the past 3 months. Our main paid source of leads was Google Ads, which have served us well over the past 10 years or so – I think I know what I am doing in adwords by now. Once per month … Continue reading "Google is dead. Where do we…

142

Keep the Internet Open

The FCC has announced plans to roll back policies on net neutrality, and its new head has indicated he has no plan to stop soon. The internet is a public good, and I believe access should be a...

143

Enough Is Enough

I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation. And software is closer to media than it is to hardware. Patenting software is like patenting music. The mess around the Lodsys patents should be a wake up call to everyone involved in the patent business (government bureaucrats…

147

The cognitive costs of air pollution

Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented . However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in…

148

The Bullshit Web

My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]

150

I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud

This weekend I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed…