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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 597 posts.
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Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse
Today, Nextcloud 15 has been made available. As there is so much new and improved in this release, we have dedicated separate blogs to each main area of improvement. This blog covers a preview of the the brand new Nextcloud Social app, introducing social networking to Nextcloud. Download now! The Mastodon project is…
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The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth
Three points motivated me to write this — forming a Bermuda Triangle in which the average American’s savings disappear without any apparent cause. 1. Considerations on Cost Disease — the observation that certain costs (Education, Medical Care, Housing) have increased many times fas
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Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is suing Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants, have relea...
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Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system
This post will probably only make sense to those deeply involved in Mastodon and the fediverse. So if that’s not your thing, or you’re not interested in issues…
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Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary
Mastodon was first announced to the public through Hacker News, a link aggregator site for programmers, on October 6, 2016. Now we’re celebrating the 2 year anniversary! 🎉
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What OpenStreetMap can be
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.
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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
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The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.
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FreeBSD Celebrates 25th Anniversary
Join us to celebrate FreeBSD Day! FreeBSD Day, celebrated on June 19, commemorates the launch of the FreeBSD open source operating system and recognizes its pioneering and continued impact on technology. On June 19, 1993, an email thread on an early BSD list proposed project names for a new open source UNIX…
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Against Facebook
On the commodification of attention, the abuses of unpaid microwork and strategies of resistance.
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MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution
Why this post? Because there are rumours spreading about a presumed “MPEG-Video collapse” and Brownian motion-like initiatives trying to remedy – in some cases by the very people who have contributed to creating the “crisis”. Who is the author of this post? Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chairman of MPEG, but…
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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
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Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush
A few weeks before Christmas, an impish chart appeared on the Bank of England’s unofficial blog. It compared plunging productivity with the soaring shipments of smartphones. Typical productivity gr…
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Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
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To Delete Facebook or Not to Delete Facebook? That Is Not the Question
Since the Cambridge Analytica news hit headlines, calls for users to ditch the platform have picked up speed. Whether or not it has a critical impact on the company’s user base or bottom line, the message from #DeleteFacebook is clear: users are fed up. EFF is not here to tell you whether or not to...
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How a Political Engineering Firm Exposed Their Code Base
Political data firm AggregateIQ exposed IT assets that raise questions for society about how technology is being used in recent US political history.
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On paying for software
The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…
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Wikipedia bans agenda-driven editor, but punishes the messenger too
A look at a Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign to discredit anti-war campaigners and journalists
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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
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“I-Cut-You-Choose” Cake-Cutting Protocol Inspires Solution to Gerrymandering
CMU researchers say getting political parties to equitably draw congressional district boundaries can be as easy as sharing cake.
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Movim – Federated, open-source alternative to Tumblr
Tumblr has decided to ban all NSFW content from its network. Although we understand the reasons…
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SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
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Dark Patterns, the Ratchet
A dark pattern in the design world means something that is purposefully created to mislead users and to get them to perform actions against their own interest.