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Trackers and bank accounts
A Finnish online bank leaked out user data by using a third-party tracker script.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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New York Times Election Day Crossword (2009)
I recently read a book called Pretty Girl In Crimson Rose (8) [1] , an autobiography interweaved with interesting stories about crosswords. ...
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Over-reliance on CGI in movies
On the digital void that is modern cinema
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We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home. )
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I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
I downloaded all the posts on Bluesky as of 2023-05-01. Then I did some data analysis on the 1680399 posts from 45457 accounts.
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Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse
When tech companies take it upon themselves to arbitrate what is or isn't misinformation they think they're the patricians of internet discourse. The reality is they're the plumbing. Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media coverage around the pandemic can be classified into five logical fallacies.
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What happened with LEGO
The price of a brick. NOTE: This blog has been moved to here “What happened with Legos? They used to be simple. Oh come on, I know you know what I’m talking about. Legos were simple. Somethin…
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What happened to Vivaldi Social?
A deep dive into the events of Saturday 8 July 2023, when user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance.
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Machines are better referees than humans but we’ll be sued if we use them
Andy Howlett and Mark Williamson in our group have been developing fantastic software. It can read the whole scientific literature and analyse it in minute detail. One of the things we are starting with is chemistry. ChemVisitor (part of AMI2) can read chemical structure diagrams and chemical names and work out what…
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Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage
This story has been making the rounds on the internet with a claim that you’ve probably been told during visits to castles, but, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever. In short the idea…
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Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950
The shifting majorities of the sexes in the workplace.
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Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely
We already put legal limits on financial, medical, military, transportation, and agriculture technology. Why not online tracking?
2176
TSA Master Keys
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors…
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The Mafia of Pharma Pricing
4% of all the money in America flows through a few mafia-like health care conglomerates. The FTC just released a ground-breaking report on how they operate. And it is gearing up to sue.
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Did the early medieval era ever take place?
On the “phantom time hypothesis”, the bizarre conspiracy theory that 297 years of European history were entirely made up.
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Financial innovations brought by technology
Tech firms and financial institutions, working together, have in the recent past made core financial services much better for consumers.
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A US Visa in 937 Days
Here's the complete timeline of events. From my first denial to travel to the US until I eventually received a tourist visa. And then I can't go anyway. December 5-11, 2016 I spent a week on Hawaii with Mozilla - my employer at the time. This was my 12th visit to the US over a … Continue reading a US visa in 937 days →
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California needs real math education, not gimmicks
A guest post by Armand Domalewski.
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China
The most important story of 2014 that most people ignored was the Chinese economy overtaking the US economy. (This is using the purchasing power parity metric, which incorporates differences in...
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AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
Tonight, I took the time actually to read DeepMind’s AlphaCode paper, and to work through the example contest problems provided, and understand how I would’ve solved those problems, and how A…
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Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019)
Your email provider owns your online identity by controlling your email address. You can’t port your email address to another provider as with phone numbers.
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The social obligation to be bad at things
This page has moved to https://drmaciver.com/notebook/2020/02/the-social-obligation-to-be-bad-at-things/ .
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French Appeal Court affirms decision that copyright claims on GPL are invalid
This article follows the case of Entr’Ouvert vs Orange on a GPL copyright violation. The case went to the Tribunal de Grande Instance in 2019 and went to the Cour d’Appel recently in 20…
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Be critical or be corrupted
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too