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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
For many years, telecom and Net Neutrality-related policies have been a hot-button political issue for me, to the extent that I, an ordinary software engineer at Microsoft have been blocked on Twitter by former FCC chairman Ajit Pai because I tweeted support for Net Neutrality publicly. I also noticed that Net…
Apple isn’t blocking the ability for Facebook to personalize ads, in any way. Apple is just providing *users* with control over their own privacy.
A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that…
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…
I'm organizing a boycott of Apple's Feedback Assistant , starting immediately, and I encourage all Apple developers to join me. Here's how I propose that each of us can effectively participate in the boycott and let Apple know that we're boycotting Feedback Assistant:
Thoughts on FOSS and fintech, layered by Mahmoud Hashemi
We cannot fix probability with more probability. We need to re-introduce assert.
On large platforms, it's impossible to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on. David Turner made a simple game to illustrate how difficult this is even in a trivial case, No Vehicles in the Park . If you haven't played it yet, I recommend playing it now before…
The economy is crashing because Wall Street spent trillions shorting Japan's currency and now they're being squeezed.
Social isolation can be as unhealthy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and loneliness affects nearly half of Americans—but few organizations are addressing this critical psychosocial risk factor. Here are three strategies, shared by leading organizations, to address the epidemic.
The importance of seeing, smiling and talking to people
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a method to produce very low emission concrete at scale – an innovation that could be transformative in the transition to net zero.
I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which…
How mindless consumption is making our FYPs worse.
Bike Index tracks a Colorado-to-Mexico stolen bike pipeline - and learns things along the way
TL;DR: If you have a LinkedIn account, you were signed up to SlideShare automatically without your knowledge or consent. Your account including all your personal information will be sold to ScribD …
Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief prior to the raids on his office and home.
In the Cyberwar category, we are listing 364,000 files from the Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency responsible for censorship of Russian media, specifically from the republic of Bashkortostan.
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…
“24h Sunrise/Sunset” is an installation that displays a realtime sunset and sunrise somewhere happening in the world with the use of CCTV. Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3B+, Arduino Nano Every , custom PCB, power supply’s, VFD displays, lasercut metal and LEDs. Software: Python 3 & Firebase realtime databases Changelog of…
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl…
Netflix’s “current” federal income tax for 2020 was $24 million, which equals just 0.9 percent of the company’s pretax income for the year. This is another way of saying Netflix paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 0.9 percent in 2020. If the company paid the statutory rate, its tax bill would be $572…
Despite the good intentions behind the movement to get people to code, both the basic premise and approach are flawed. The movement sits on the idea that “coding is the new literacy,” but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is.
