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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
google@play-store: sudo rm -rf org.mtransit.android*
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Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
Well, as of sometime on December 5th a huge number of the archivists that were scrambling to rescue archives from Yahoo Groups, had their {e-mail addresses} apparently banned so they can no longer…
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Fast
San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 , yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost…
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How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer
It is possible to restrict Google AMP from your life both as a web user and as a web developer. Here’s how you can fight back against Google AMP.
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I Miss Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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The cognitive costs of air pollution
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented . However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in…
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Why Bother with What Three Words?
I'll be wording this post carefully as What 3 Words (W3W) have a tenacious PR team and, probably, have a lot more lawyers than I do. W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me. A brief primer. The world is a sphere. We can reference any point on the surface…
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Tim Cook’s Company-Wide Email on Hkmap.live Doesn’t Add Up
Link to: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1182348757360234497
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Fight back against Google AMP (2018)
Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short.AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this…
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Cookie Warning Shenanigans Have Got to Stop
This will be short, ranty and to the point: these warnings are getting ridiculous: I know, tell you something you don't know! The whole ugly issue reared its head again on the weekend courtesy of the story in this tweet: > I’m not sure if this makes it better
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WeWTF
I’ve started nine firms and I’m, generously, 3-4-2 (win-lose-tie). In retrospect, and I think about this a lot, the only reliable forward-looking indicator of our firm’s success or failure was … timing. Specifically, the part of the economic cycle at founding. The firms we started in recessions had an easier time…
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Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore
The top-secret story of why NUKEMAP switched from Google Maps to Mapbox+Leaflet.
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Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
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Coffee Is Hard
Way back in the 80s, some people had a dream of combining the cutesy graphics of 80s visual games and the soul-crushing difficulty of 80s text adventures. And so Sierra On-Line created quest games.
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A Walk in Hong Kong
My mom fainted the first time she set foot in an American supermarket. It was 1981 and we were freshly arrived in America, and some combination of the culture shock and smell and sensory overload of a Safeway was too much for her, not normally a fainting woman.
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In Defense of Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, most…
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Give Firefox a chance
We live in the era of browser monopoly. Google occupied the whole web by its Chrome. Chrome has more...
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Graying Out
For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
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I just had over a thousand Euros stolen and Revolut is siding with the thief
UPDATE : Revolut has refunded me, I will update the post with more details soon.
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Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
A detailed explanation of why I keep saying that advertising is a cancer on modern society.