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US blogger fined 8,000 Euros by France for criticizing Société Générale
A few days ago I learned, via a French blog, that I was fined 8,000 euros for quoting a French blogger. I would have known earlier, but the ...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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I Still Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem
One of the most popular blog posts I have written is called "I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem". In it, I rant against service providers trying to lock their customers into a monoculture. Companies are always looking for the edge which will make them stand out - they think that restricting what their…
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The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)
I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. Predictably, the move caused …
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Dude, you broke the future
Back to: PSA: Please don't nominate the Laundry Files for a Best Series Hugo Award (this year) | Forward to: New Book Week!
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Ok Google – it's time you discovered cyclists
Dear Google. Here is a humble suggestion from us as cyclists, especially urgent in Corona times. We see how people around the world turn to the bicycle to get to where they are going and at the same time avoid overcrowded busses and trams. Here is where you both can be a part, and improve!…
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Group chats rule the world
The importance and dynamics of private group chats in shaping tech discourse
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The death of a TLD
Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out.
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CIA, MKUltra, and the cover-up of U.S. germ warfare in the Korean war (2022)
CIA & Army Counterintelligence involved in secret “processing” of U.S. POWs who confessed to using biological weapons against China, No…
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Automatically tagging politician when they use their phone on the livestreams
How does it work? Every meeting of the flemish government in Belgium is live streamed on a youtube channel. When a livestream starts the software is searching for phones and tries to identify a distracted politician. This is done with the help of AI and face recognition. The video of the distracted politician are then…
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TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In
TIME is now serving two different versions of its website. Humans get the magazine. AI crawlers get a stripped down markdown copy with ads baked in that no person will ever see. I fetched one ordinary…
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Dutch Judge Who Ordered Pirate Bay Links Censored Has Conflict of Interest
Judge Chris Hensen, who ordered the Dutch Pirate Party to censor all links to The Pirate Bay recently (something Techdirt calls Censorship Crazy), appears...
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The Internet Is for Porn
It always was, it always will be.
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Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
TLDR: “make the web do apps” is not a disruptive strategy. It's like surviving The Great Oxidation Event, then saying “make anaerobes do photosynthesis”. Ok, but the blue-green algae got there first, so photosynthesis is no longer asymmetric. It is symmetric competition.
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Two narratives about AI
I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point ... Read more
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Thatcher killed the UK’s superfast broadband before it even existed
Grrrh! I could get really annoyed about this! Living and working in rural Stirlingshire has its advantages for sure, but fast broadband is not one of them.
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Russia Poisons Wikipedia
How state-sponsored actors exploit the open-source platform to skew reality, create 'foreign digital interference' and what that means for the future of facts
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Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017)
UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse
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Ethical anti-design, or designing products that people can't get addicted to
In the photo above, a Wii Remote is sitting on a table next to an open window. People who grew up playing the Wii might remember it; while playing Wii Sports, the game would give you a pop up window of it with a message politely reminding you that you can always take a break. While it might seem a bit…
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50 authors, 50 science fiction stories shorter than novels
See the updated 80 author version. I've been playing around with re-reading favorite science fiction short stories while also seeing if the...
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Superrational
“Will Vicktoreya Keyneslee Beauxpensees please come see the principal right now?” said the voice over the intercom.
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Why the Sun 2 has a message “Love your country, but never trust its government”
Yesterday, Alec Muffet posted a few tweets regarding the Sun SPARC 2 bootloader’s DES routines.
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An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia's U.S. News Ranking
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
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The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment
Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.