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I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (2014)
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to…
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash
The latest announcements for Windows 11 have revealed that the next version of the Windows operating system will have very stringent hardware requirements. Some of them are, in my opinion, quite reasonable. For example, they’re finally dropping support for 32 bit X86 and legacy BIOS boot. These make sense, because…
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Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
A collection of my personal work, including essays, projects, and photos.
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How to Destroy the Earth (2006)
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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Certified 100% AI-free organic content
This is a last call to introduce a "made by an organically-sourced human" label.
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CloudFlare is ruining the internet for me (2016)
Follow up: Cloudflare: Making the internet a little bit faster – for a select group of people CloudFlare is a very helpful service if you are a website owner and don’t want to deal with separate…
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We are like prisoners... We do not have a life, only work.
DropCatch.com helps you secure expiring domain names.
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FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow
The FBI wants strong encryption without key escrow, which is insecure at scale, to be illegal or impractical. Data breach risks rise as devices get less secure.
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Cities need more trees
A case for planting more trees in urban areas.
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Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
Some years ago, Matt Daniels [1] wrote a great article on who has the largest vocabulary in hip-hop. I thought it was brilliant: comparing Shakespeare to famous hip-hop artists. It got me thinking and gave me the inspiration of doing something similar with a genre I love: Power Metal. People …
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Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction
The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and…
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Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
A peek behind the curtain into the struggles of the Chinese censorship office
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Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing
I really like Ted Chiang’s writing.
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Bahraini Government Hacks Activists with NSO Group Zero-Click iPhone Exploits
We identified nine Bahraini activists whose iPhones were successfully hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between June 2020 and February 2021. The hacked activists included three members of Waad (a secular Bahraini political society), three members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, two exiled Bahraini…
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Carmen Ortiz Has Blood on Her Hands (2013)
I entered Boston University Law School in the Fall of 2011. Like most law schools during the heyday of blogging, BU's prospective students website featured a handful of blogs that were written by current students. To get a blog on the site, you had to be selected among various applicants, and, if you were selected…
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Court: Breaking Your Employer's Computer Policy Isn't a Crime
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision...
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“Invisible Electrostatic Wall” at 3M adhesive tape plant (1996)
SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION, 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1995, 8:00 am SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION: ELECTROSTATIC CONSIDERATIONS IN INDUSTRY MODERATOR: D. Swenson, 3M 7.7 CASE STUDY - LARGE PLASTIC WEB ELECTROSTATIC PROBLEMS, RESULTS, AND CURE, D. Swenson, 3M Company Tremendous static charge…
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SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — June 17, 2026 — SMPTE®, the home of media professionals, technologists and engineers, has announced that its entire Standards catalog is now freely available to the global media technology community.
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Pineapple Fund Offers $4M Matching Grant to MAPS for MDMA Research
CONTACT: Brad Burge, Director of Strategic Communications, MAPS Media Requests: Press Resouces:
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Please Donate to the Internet Archive
Dear Supporters of the Archive, In the last year, the number of people using the Internet Archive has increased to two million people every day, and our collections of free books, music, video, and web pages have also grown by twenty to twenty-five percent. This is great news, but we are doing it all
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An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter
Updates: Our open letter made the WSJ, and has been tweeted by Matt Yglesias and others. See also Boaz Barak’s thread, and a supportive tweet from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley). If you…
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Why we are suing the Administration
TikTok is the world's leading destination for short-form mobile videos. Our mission is to capture and present the world's creativity, knowledge, and moments that matter in everyday life. TikTok empowers everyone to be a creator directly from their smartphones, and is committed to building a community by encouraging…
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Solar and batteries can power the world
Solar and batteries are cheap enough that most people can get most of their electricity from them, and save money. This equation gets better and better over time as their costs decline.
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We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall]AI: "Nuclear power. Double teachers' salaries. Build more houses. Distribute food more fairly. TRAINS—"— qntmyrrh (@qntm) November 24, 2023 I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure for cancer, or a…
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