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Society, Policy & Culture

The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.

2023
308

Why is remote work seen as a gift?

It’s hardly insightful to suggest that the last few years have substantially changed the day to day experience of a knowledge worker. Nearly overnight even the most remote skeptical leadership teams were forced to embrace flexible work practices like working from home. But now, despite COVID-19 being a

313

Did I receive fraudulent DMCA takedowns?

I received 3 DMCA takedown emails today, covering 7350 URLs on my hardbin.com IPFS gateway. The URLs were allegedly serving infringing copies of books. The strange part is that of those 7350 URLs, during the time for which I have nginx logs, none of them have ever been accessed , and of the ones that I checked, none…

321

Forget spaceships; I just want my music

A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?" They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least. But a few albums, like Bluey's soundtrack, transcend the children's genre. They're…

323

Plastic Money

You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the balance tracking and authorization decisions happen within a financial institution that…

325

I’ve been single all my life

I’m single. I don’t know if this comes as a surprise to you. Of course, you have yet to hear me talking about a wife or a girlfriend. But I also rarely talk about dating and finding someone. The bigger surprise might be that I’m a lifelong single. In other words, I was never in any romantic or sexual relationship…

328

Self-driving cars are surveillance cameras on wheels

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement ­ and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars…