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After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off
The purpose of this article is to share my story in hopes of connecting to the right people at Facebook who can help me save my businesses…
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 629 posts.
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Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than TVs themselves
In the simplistic account of what many call "surveillance capitalism," the original sin was swapping our attention for free content, summed up in the pithy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
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Sealed U.S. Court Records Exposed in SolarWinds Breach
The ongoing breach affecting thousands of organizations that relied on backdoored products by network software firm SolarWinds may have jeopardized the privacy of countless sealed court documents on file with the U.S. federal court system, according to a memo released Wednesday by the Administrative Office (AO) of the…
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Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice
Would you like to know a secret?
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Windows Refund Day (1999)
Anyway, a few people from SVLUG , including Don Marti, Rick Moen (yes he was there ), Chris DiBona, the world famous Nick Moffitt, and Tabinda Khan, organized the Bay Area windows refund effort. Since at the Linux tea party , microsoft showed up at our meeting point to try to deter us from going to their offices in…
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Short fat engineers are undervalued
Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep.
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Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
Facebook unfriended me. Why? So far as I can tell, it’s because I’ve been using Facebook to advocate for decentralization of social media. And apparently th ...
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Europe's Software Problem
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms. For a variety of reasons, this is not a good idea. As stated recently by Charles Michel, President of the…
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Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure of our scientific…
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My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
I'd be interested in a decentralized social network with network-layer anonymity, grassroots content delivery, and customizable moderation.
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FedEx shipping damage creates fractured artworks
Since 2007, artist Walead Beshty has been cleverly using FedEx’s shipping infrastructure to create a series of artworks. He constructs glass objects that fit ex
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The high price of mistrust
When we can’t trust each other, nothing works. As we participate in our communities less and less, we find it harder to feel other people are trustworthy. But if we can bring back a sense of trust in the people around us, the rewards are incredible.
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Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)
Well I'm in the working world again. I've found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it's returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Beca...
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Publish and Perish
Coronavirus gain-of-function research comes from playing the "Science Game"
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When McDonalds Came to Denmark
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement…
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What Is Social Cooling?
Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.” And the massive amounts of data being collected, especially online, is exaggerating…
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NYTimes Peru N-Word: My side of the story, in four parts
On February 5 this year, one week after an article about me appeared in the Daily Beast, The New York Times announced that I would be…
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Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?
I set out to investigate whether Hacker News is a useful barometer for up-and-coming technologies that will hit the mainstream within the next few years.
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Aaron Swartz, Vindicated
Almost without exception, people who invest in businesses do so without personally inspecting the business, overlooking its processes, seeing its bank statements, meeting its managers and going on the road with its sales-force.
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Culture shock
Looking at the United States as an Indian, two months in.
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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more…
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The art of asking nicely
There are upsides to working with a neural net that trained on a huge collection of internet images and text. One is that, instead of ominous grey geometric blobs [https://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing-but-will-try-anyways] when it doesn't understand your
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