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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)
Whose woods these are I think I know
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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Congress Must Act After US Government Admits To Warrantless Wiretapping
As Congress and the President rush to re-authorize the dangerous FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the law shamefully passed after pressure to legalize certain portions of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program—EFF has been sounding the alarm that Americans’ communications are still being...
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The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
History is bound to repeat itself and it has almost every year
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Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society”
David Zipper, who researches and writes about mobility and transportation, recently did a big thread on Mastodon (and Bluesky) about car bloat: the way in which
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Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
Explore the diversity of wildlife across the planet. What are species threatened with? What can we do to prevent biodiversity loss?
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Majority of gig economy workers are earning below minimum wage: research
As the cost of living continues to spiral, a new report shows more than half of gig economy workers in the UK are paid below the minimum wage.
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Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”
The popular book from the "world's most famous living psychiatrist" is riddled with blatant misrepresentations
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TSA tries out another biometric system
Today the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that it has launched a “pilot” at Washington National Airport (DCA) of yet another scheme for biometric identification and tracking of domestic air travelers.
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They made computers behave like annoying salesmen
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen | exotext
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Dark Web Price Index 2020
To see just how prevalent items of personal data are being listed on the dark web, and at what price, we sent our researchers on a data-gathering mission.
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Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US
On Apr 14 2015, the Virginia State Board of Elections immediately decertified use of the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. This seems pretty minor, but it received a tremendous amount of pushback from some local election officials. In this post, I’ll explain how we got to that…
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Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site
A personal account of building HeheStreams, facing the consequences, and going to prison as a startup founder who had a piracy website.
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Oura says it gets government demands for user data
Oura users' data is not end-to-end encrypted and can be handed to the government. Will the wearable tech maker say how often it turns over data?
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Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes
In an era when the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) images is at the fingertips of the masses, the ability to detect fake pictures – particularly deepfakes...
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Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
Diaspora, the “open Facebook alternative” (NYT story for background if you aren’t familiar), has raised Over $170,000 from over 4600 people in just a few weeks. All for an idea. That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. HereR…
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Antitrust lawsuit says Apple and Amazon colluded to raise iPhone, iPad prices
SEATTLE – A new antitrust class-action lawsuit accuses Apple Inc. and Amazon.com of colluding to raise the price of iPhones and iPads, according to Hagens Berman, the law firm representing consumers against two of the world’s largest companies in today’s filing.
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Facebook’s claims about the Ad Observer are wrong
Recently the Surgeon General of the United States weighed in on the spread of disinformation on major platforms and its effects on people and society. He e
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Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need
You know those things that, once you learn about them for the first time, you start seeing them absolutely everywhere? Recently, that’s been my experience with problem-solution ordering issues. They keep cropping up: not just in the context of gam...
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Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?
A new change in Iceland’s government means that joining the EU is back on the cards for Iceland.
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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U.S. Army Chooses Google Workspace
Google Public Sector will provide 250,000 active-duty enlisted members of the U.S. Army with Google Workspace.
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Statistics, we have a problem
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS) in…