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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
Edit: I feel compelled to make a small clarification; I'm not arguing for purging all files greater than X MiB (even though I still think LibGen has a non-negligible amount of junk and duplicate content but neither are easy to remove without significant manpower and LibGen lacks mechanisms to crowdsource the work)…
June 30th, 2014 marks a turning point for Austria. Not only was the Vorratsdatenspeicherung (data retention) terminated preliminarily for good (no, really), the operation of TOR exit nodes supposedly was also declared a criminal offense by a regional criminal court. The accused was operating a TOR exit node which was…
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1961 The books Catch-22, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Phantom Tollbooth, the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story, and more. . . Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after…
GPT-2 is a direct scale-up of GPT-1 , with more parameters and trained on more data. However, it was deemed too dangerous to release by OpenAI:
I bought a litter box and involuntarily signed up to a never ending subscription service.
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
A few years ago, Microsoft launched a Office 365 campaign with the slogan of #GetItDone. The basic premise was fitting more work into more places of your life. Well, not so much just fitting as sho…
The government is using shaky legal arguments to silence major Internet companies without giving them – or the public – the opportunity to respond. In three separate recent cases, the government has sent a grand jury subpoena to Yahoo or Twitter and requested a gag order from a magistrate judge, attempting to bar…
an interactive guide
Everyone should be able to read the law, discuss it, and share it with others, without having to pay a toll or sign a contract. Seems obvious, right? Unfortunately, a federal district court has said otherwise, ruling that private organizations can use copyright to control access to huge portions of...
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
Intel Search Results Page
A way to talk about programming languages, and a plea to Think Different™
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
Advertisement needs to end. It is insane to think that a piece of software, so fundamental to running computers, an operating system is selling user behavior to advertisers.
The tropical wood type ipê is popular for building exclusive wooden decks, and in North America and Europe, the demand for the material has increased sharply. Now, a study from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows that more than three-quarters of all ipê from the top producing region in Brazil could have…
Vigilant Solutions, one of the country’s largest brokers of vehicle surveillance technology, is offering a hell of a deal to law enforcement agencies in Texas: a whole suite of automated license plate reader (ALPR) equipment and access to the company’s massive databases and analytical tools—and it...
EFF is stunned and deeply saddened by the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper. As free speech advocates, we mourn the use of violence against individuals who used creativity and free expression to engage in cultural and political criticism. Murder is the ultimate form of...
The first in a series of posts on the Post Office Horizon prosecutions scandal
Fin Moorhouse's website
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
Introducing Hegel, our new family of property-based testing libraries.
