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Against Facebook
On the commodification of attention, the abuses of unpaid microwork and strategies of resistance.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 302 posts.
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MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution
Why this post? Because there are rumours spreading about a presumed “MPEG-Video collapse” and Brownian motion-like initiatives trying to remedy – in some cases by the very people who have contributed to creating the “crisis”. Who is the author of this post? Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chairman of MPEG, but…
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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
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Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush
A few weeks before Christmas, an impish chart appeared on the Bank of England’s unofficial blog. It compared plunging productivity with the soaring shipments of smartphones. Typical productivity gr…
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Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
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On paying for software
The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…
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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
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Dark Patterns, the Ratchet
A dark pattern in the design world means something that is purposefully created to mislead users and to get them to perform actions against their own interest.
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No funding for uncomfortable results
Latanya Sweeney blew the whistle on how easy supposedly de-identified data could be re-identified. Her results were not well received.
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The Firefox Dilemma
Consider whether we're advocating for Firefox in the right way, on the right grounds.
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On Cash
What happened was, I was walking through a train station on the way to work with the buds playing randomly on shuffle and a knifeblade of Real Music came in from outside so I had to pull them out of my ears, there was this young dude getting great electric sound out of a teeny amp doing a slow take on Little Wing with…
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AT&T, Time Warner, and the Need for Neutrality
It is no surprise that a judge allowed the AT&T-Time Warner acquisition to proceed given the government’s poor case; the question is if a better case could have been made. What is ultima…
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Prove you are not an evil corporate person
Google Is Quietly Providing AI Technology for Drone Strike Targeting Project Google Is Helping the Pentagon Build AI for Drones
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Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media
A Social Transition Last week, I wrote a blog post emphasizing the distinction between the social internet and social media. The former describes the internet’s ... Read more
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Post-apocalyptic life in American health care
Experiences navigating disintegrating American health care institutions, and what they might imply for life in 2037
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E-Mail Leaves an Evidence Trail
If you’re going to commit an illegal act, it’s best not to discuss it in e-mail. It’s also best to Google tech instructions rather than asking someone else to do it: One new detail from the indictment, however, points to just how unsophisticated Manafort seems to have been. Here’s the relevant passage from the…
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The Missing Computer Skills of High School Students
It’s been just over fours years since I started mentoring high school students at work , and I recently began mentoring my fourth such student. That’s enough students for me to start observing patterns. Of course, each arrives with different computer knowledge and experience, but there have been two consistent and…
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Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
In 2013, I had the idea of making a newsgroup search engine. All I had to do was download all newsgroup postings and index them. Well I wro...
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