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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access...
ICQ is turning 20 (and that is no small potatoes). A whole generation has already grown up with the forerunner of all messengers. For this…
Employees at Yahoo have had a rough decade. The company has been drifting aimlessly with little vision, an endless parade of CEOs, and a flatlined stock price. That’s not exactly a conducive environment to be inspired and motivated within, let alone do the stellar work that Yahoo needs to pul…
This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks…
The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for "the onion router" and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays where each relay only knows the next hop, not the ultimate destination.
There's a simple three-part test for whether your city has enough nature. Most fall short.
Editor’s note: Numbers for each prison census are adjusted yearly as CPJ learns of arrests, releases, or deaths in prison. The numbers for CPJ’s 2021 census have been revised from 293 to 302 in accordance with this policy. For the most recent data, see cpj.org/data/imprisoned/ The number of journalists jailed around…
George Orwell? Alfred Harmsworth? William Randolph Hearst? L. E. Edwardson? Robert W. Sawyer? Mark Rhea Byers? Brian R. Roberts? Malcolm Muggeridge? Katharine Graham? Lord Rothermere? Lord Northcliffe? Anonymous?
I’m very happy to share that Mozilla has been named the Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy in 2012, according to a study performed by the Ponemon
The FBI has successfully accessed data on an iPhone that has been the subject of a legal battle between the Justice Department and Apple, according to a court filing. EFF is pleased that the Justice Department has retreated from its dangerous and unconstitutional attempt to force Apple to subvert...
This morning I received the following email: Classification: NOT PROTECTIVELY MARKED Dear Sir or Madam, Re: Website domain name suspension request #2 On the 24th September 2013, EasyDNS Technologies was emailed a domain suspension request for the following domain(s) that to date we have not received a reply nor seen…
Vehicles with especially tall front ends are most dangerous to pedestrians, but a blunt profile makes medium-height vehicles deadly too.
The safety of our community is vital to us and we will continue to uphold our community guidelines to ensure a safe environment for our creators.
rant and building of the slop YOLO project to detect other slop YOLO projects
Editor’s note: this version was updated at 6:00 pm pacific to include a couple of paragraphs that were omitted from the original post. Also–HI to all the thousands of regular people coming to visit today. I get it–we ALL hate unwanted calls and texts. But destroying the infrastructure of connecting consumers with…
How a new X feature led to the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since 2016.
Even when you try to do good, you can end up doing accidental harm. But there are ways you can minimise the risks.
Today's big news is that researchers have found proof of Chinese manufacturers putting backdoors in American chips that the military uses. T...
In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. This 2014 decision has significantly reduced the harm caused by vague and overbroad software patents. Before Alice, patent owners who had...
In a stunning rejection of the will of five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Single Market...
State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.
In this final post of a three-part series, we discuss how Apple's approach to content is an anticompetitive slippery slope.
Feeding slop is an act of war
