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Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
In a new paper, Yale SOM’s Fiona Scott Morton writes that the company took control of the social media industry by misleading consumers and buying up rivals.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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A child’s privacy is worth more than likes (2022)
The Privacy Whisperer, by Luiza Jarovsky
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School closures led to more sleep and better quality of life for adolescents
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We should measure well-being instead of failing to measure economic productivity
Measuring Economic Productivity Is Pretty Much Bullshit -- We Should Be Measuring Well-Being Catalysis Instead
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One of the world’s most visited websites that nobody is aware of (2017)
The editorial department of well-known Dutch broadcaster RTL News recently asked for my assistance. Multiple tax files of Dutch citizens had been published via www.docplayer.nl and no one could explain – where did these files come from? Who would have thought that my research would lead to the discovery of one of the…
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Software Pump and Dump
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
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F-Droid's Progress and What's Coming in 2025
With 2024 now behind us, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the growth and achievements we accomplished as a community last year, and celebrate the inc...
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People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017)
Selections from the Washington Post's Gilded Age coverage of notable visitors to the city
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The case for ending Amazon’s dominance
It should not be difficult to love Amazon. To consumers, it offers choice and convenience. Countless internet ventures have relied on its cheap, flexible cloud computing services to start and scale…
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When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is ...
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Is your son a computer hacker? (2001)
As an enlightened, modern parent , I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company…
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ChatGPT, Rot13, and Daniel Kahneman
I thought it would be interesting to see whether ChatGPT could solve some basic ciphers (Caesar, Vignere, etc.). I decided to start at the bottom, with perhaps the easiest possible cipher: rot13. I asked it to decode the rot-13 encoding of “Why did the chicken cross the road”: So the first thing to note here is that…
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Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1
After posting my reaction to clause 3.3.1 of the iPhone SDK terms I decided to write Steve Jobs the following email:
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Saudi Arabia executes Mustafa al-Darwish for teenage protests
In a statement this morning, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of the Interior announced that Mustafa Hashem al-Darwish has been executed. His family received no advance notice, and found out Mustafa had been executed by reading the news online. Mustafa was arrested in May 2015, and charged with offences related to his…
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The Religion of Speed
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
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What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
When software developers write code, they often use tools called IDEs, integrated development environments, that provide contextual information needed to manage the complexity of modern software. What would such a workspace look like, if it were designed for journalism?
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Amazon deletes purchased copies of 1984 from Kindle
Amazon removed purchased e-books from Kindles when a publisher had second thoughts about online distribution.
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Why we will not be registering easydns.sucks
Similar to how it's getting harder these days to differentiate actual news from The Onion satires, reality takes on a somewhat surreal timbre when it starts to imitate your April Fool's gags from yesteryear… In 2011 we joked "easyDNS To Launch .SUX TLD", in which we posited a thinly veiled…
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Metadata Equals Surveillance
Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people—including President Obama—discounted the seriousness of the NSA’s actions by saying that it’s just metadata. Lots and lots…
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My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)
Note – This is a true story based on my own experiences and what I’ve heard from the people involved, but for privacy, all of the names have been changed. Note 2 – This is an old piece, repub…
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On the Weaponisation of Open Source
First of all I need the preface this article on how much I abhor the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I wholeheartedly support the sanctions. However, I think the conflict has spilled over into areas of software development that have got some unintended consequences attached. As part of this post, I’m going to look at…