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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace
Autodesk did trademark cyberspace, and William Gibson did get mad. But the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking Eric Gullichsen was a prank by Timothy Leary.
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What I'm Telling US Congress about Data Breaches
Last week I wrote about my upcoming congressional testimony [https://www.troyhunt.com/im-testifying-in-front-of-congress-in-washington-dc-about-data-breaches-what-should-i-say/] and wow - you guys are awesome! Seriously, the feedback there was absolutely sensational and it's helped shape what I'll
2315
The bee that everyone wants to save
My neighbour has 50 hives, the road has 30 more. That's 4 million honeybees, and not one of them is the bee that actually needs saving.
2316
We can do better than “same, but electric”
We've been making compromises to the limits of fossil fuels for so long that we've forgotten they're compromises.
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Netflix's New Chapter
Netflix waited out Blockbuster with better economics, and it’s seeking to do the same with its competitors today; the key to the company’s differentiation, though, is increasingly creat…
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Mastodon is big in Japan, and the reason why is uncomfortable
Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable Remember Mastodon? In April 2017, there was a wave of excitement about Mastodon, a federated social network begun in October 2016 by Eugen …
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Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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2321
Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
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TikTok’s Poison Pill
Just a few months ago, it seemed that the biggest social media news of the year would be Elon Musk’s flirtations with buying Twitter (see, ... Read more
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Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
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Why I am pro-GPL
Last night at OSCON I attended the lightning talks (here called "Ignite Talks"). Most of them were pretty good (I especially loved Emily Dunham's "First Impressions (the value of the 'noob')" talk), but the last talk of the night was titled "Why I don’t use the GPL" by Shane Curcuru, "VP of Brand Management at the…
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Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)
The Noam Chomsky Website.
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Omni Group Layoffs
Omni’s been around for almost 30 years, and I hope it’s around for another 30. It’s one of the great Mac and iOS shops — they will sing songs about Omni, at maximum volume, in the great halls.
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Publicity Stunt Fallout
Update (Dec. 6): I’m having a blast at the Workshop on Spacetime and Quantum Information at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I’m learning a huge amount from the talks and …
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Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API
Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful…
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LibGen's Bloat Problem
Edit: I feel compelled to make a small clarification; I'm not arguing for purging all files greater than X MiB (even though I still think LibGen has a non-negligible amount of junk and duplicate content but neither are easy to remove without significant manpower and LibGen lacks mechanisms to crowdsource the work)…
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GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)
GPT-2 is a direct scale-up of GPT-1 , with more parameters and trained on more data. However, it was deemed too dangerous to release by OpenAI:
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Cat Litter Boxes and DRM
I bought a litter box and involuntarily signed up to a never ending subscription service.
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What Happens Next? Covid-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Simulations
an interactive guide
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Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
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Where have all the hackers gone?
A way to talk about programming languages, and a plea to Think Different™
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I quit – Peak indifference, big tobacco
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
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Microsoft Advertisement Inc.
Advertisement needs to end. It is insane to think that a piece of software, so fundamental to running computers, an operating system is selling user behavior to advertisers.