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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 700 posts.
Perhaps it will turn out that you were called to be an artist. If that is your fate, then accept it and deal with it, the highs and the lows, the burden and the greatness, without ever worrying about external rewards.
But domain pricing is very confusing. Let's demystify it.
Here is a short and curious Twitter thread from app developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry: Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an iCloud account. Meaning, Apple’s…
Update: Here’s the link to the HN discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32291993
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
T oday is going to be the day that you read a lot about the UK’s intention to kill cookie pop-ups as part of its post-Brexit Data Reform Bill. By now you should have somehow realised that there’s a bit more to it than that, and that your work is not set to get any easier.
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
Illustration from unDraw I want to personalize things I use. I want to change the settings. I want to change the colors, the desi...
“Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That’s Google’s stated mission. But what if the world's information becomes…
Open letter from an Android developer to the Android community and especially to Purnima Kochikar, Director of Google Play, Apps & Games…
Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy. People living in Norway are used to
The importance of seeing, smiling and talking to people
Recently, I've been getting a lot of spam notifications from Google Drive. Here's a sample: The notifications come direct to my Android phone via the Drive app - they don't appear in my Gmail spam folder. There is no way to report the abuse. If I go to the list of notification in the Android apps, there's no option to…
This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
George Orwell? Alfred Harmsworth? William Randolph Hearst? L. E. Edwardson? Robert W. Sawyer? Mark Rhea Byers? Brian R. Roberts? Malcolm Muggeridge? Katharine Graham? Lord Rothermere? Lord Northcliffe? Anonymous?
Measuring Economic Productivity Is Pretty Much Bullshit -- We Should Be Measuring Well-Being Catalysis Instead
I thought it would be interesting to see whether ChatGPT could solve some basic ciphers (Caesar, Vignere, etc.). I decided to start at the bottom, with perhaps the easiest possible cipher: rot13. I asked it to decode the rot-13 encoding of “Why did the chicken cross the road”: So the first thing to note here is that…
First of all I need the preface this article on how much I abhor the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I wholeheartedly support the sanctions. However, I think the conflict has spilled over into areas of software development that have got some unintended consequences attached. As part of this post, I’m going to look at…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
We should look for ways to make reading, publishing, and community services all play nicely together. I'm calling this model "the unbundled web," and I think RSS should be the primary method of interop.
It is a good time to be in tech right now: soaring salaries, daily LinkedIn recruiter spam, people bootcamping their way into career switches to tech, remote work allowing you to work for a major tech company making triple digit salaries from the beach. It really feels like every single company is trying to recruit…
If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me , an online identity verification service that…
Located smack bang in the middle of South Australia’s capital city, Adelaide Airport has an interesting runway approach lighting system – located in suburban streets and residential backyards! Some background Adelaide Airport is located approximately 6 kilometres from the Adelaide CBD. With the suburbs of Brooklyn…
The world needs to use a lot more energy
A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…
Missouri Governor Mike Parson made headlines last year when he vowed to criminally prosecute a journalist for reporting a security flaw in a state website that exposed personal information of more than 100,000 teachers. But Missouri prosecutors now say they will not pursue charges following revelations that the data…
