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UK anti-encryption law
There was some surprise in the comments of yesterday's post over the fact that the United Kingdom has effectively outlawed encryption: the UK will...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation : it's a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me – because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
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The Illegal Map of Swedish Art
Maps Mania is a blog dedicated to tracking the very best digital interactive maps on the internet and the tools used to create them.
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This blog is written in en-GB
Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known. Here's the thing. No. All my blog posts start with a simple declaration: Copied…
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Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk.
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The Death of Corporate Research Labs
In American innovation through the ages , Jamie Powell wrote: who hasn’t finished a non-fiction book and thought “Gee, that could have bee...
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Deleting Uber is the least you can do
Uber is what you get when you take Silicon Valley’s most toxic values, add billions of dollars in venture capital, and spice it with…
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Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
The case for giving programmers private offices with doors — why open offices destroy deep work, how interruptions cost far more than floor space, and what the research actually says.
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We're losing our voice to LLMs
We are losing something precious in the age of LLMs: our unique voices.
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How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
An antidote to the American cycle of threat, fear, and overspending in response to terrorism is this, about Norway on the first anniversary of its terrorist massacre: And at the political level, the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg pledged to do everything to ensure the country’s core values were not undermined. “The…
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WeWTF, Part Deux
So, the mother of all party crashers took a dump in the We IPO punch bowl. The crasher? Math. The autopsy will show the shelving of this IPO was death by S-1.
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A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no…
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The TikTok War
How TikTok exposed Facebook’s blindspot, thanks to its Chinese roots, and why those Chinese roots make TikTok a genuine concern.
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Autism's confusing cousins
A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward
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The Price of Free Is Actually Too High
I loved this quote by Tristan Harris in the New York Magazine article The Internet Apologizes … “We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too
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Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Phone is still the best way to order pizza
Apps create more friction for ordering pizza
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Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds (2022)
A high-level how-to guide by Lars Doucet and Dan Cook for game designers and game economists working in large multiplayer online games and/or virtual worlds.
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Is everything an MLM
Last week, I linked to a NYT article about the spread of CorePower Yoga: how its business model is contingent upon enrolling thousands in expensive “teacher training” courses, even though there’s already a surfeit of teachers out there.
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Facebook's PR feels broken
Facebook’s communications operation has begun to feel like its completely broken down over the past few days.