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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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The worst possible antitrust outcome
Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum , proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of…
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AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service
On January 6th, 1995 two bank robbers in Pittsburgh confused law enforcement by not making any attempts to conceal their faces but instead brazenly looking at security cameras as if they were invisible. The reason is that they actually thought they were.
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The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling
It will take about three minutes to read this column. Whether it’s worth three minutes depends on me, of course. I will do my best. But it also depends on you, on your attitude to time and, perhaps…
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The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)
Early websites. In the beginning, website HTML was crafted by hand. Your average personal — or corporate — website might consist of hand-edited HTML subsequently uploaded, probably via FTP, to a web server which knew only how to serve static files.
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W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
European public institutions are betting big on digital sovereignty and open source software. And yet they recently moved their Bluesky accounts to W Social, a private, for profit network owned by Swedish entrepreneurs that has quietly gone closed-source.
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The Intellectual Obesity Crisis (2022)
Information addiction is rotting our brains
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Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
Eight years after Google initially took a stand against Internet censorship by exiting the Chinese search market, we are disappointed to learn the company has been secretly re-considering an extended collaboration with the massive censorship and surveillance-wielding state. According to an...
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Suck It, Wall Street
In a blowout comedy for the ages, finance pirates take it up the clacker
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Hundreds of dogs in Norway hit by mystery illness
The Norwegian Food Safety Authority
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CIA Director John Brennan Pretends Foreign Cryptography Doesn't Exist
Last week, CIA director John Brennan told a Senate committee that there wasn’t any strong cryptography outside of the US. CIA director John Brennan told US senators they shouldn’t worry about mandatory encryption backdoors hurting American businesses. And that’s because, according to Brennan, there’s no one else for…
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Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial
Today we learned just how determined the patent troll Lodsys is to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims. When software security company Kaspersky Lab refused to surrender, Lodsys settled for nothing (yes, you read that right—absolutely nothing) rather than take its claims to trial. First,...
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Facebook Is Not Blocking Tor Deliberately
A number of users have noticed that Facebook is blocking connections from the Tor network....
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I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
Disability, shame, and the hidden violence of a culture that equates productivity with value
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ProPublica's tax story
What happens when journalists don't have any friends in finance to challenge their thinking?
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What will a Chromium-only Web look like?
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.
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Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled
It is with deep regret that we are announcing the cancellation of this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration in Anaheim, CA.
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Internet disrupted in Kazakhstan amid energy price protests
Network data from NetBlocks confirm a significant disruption to internet service in Kazakhstan from the evening of Tuesday 4 January 2022, progressing to a nation-scale communications blackout on Wednesday afternoon. ...
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A “Sideways” supply response in California winegrapes
New data on the Sideways effect
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US blogger fined 8,000 Euros by France for criticizing Société Générale
A few days ago I learned, via a French blog, that I was fined 8,000 euros for quoting a French blogger. I would have known earlier, but the ...
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I Still Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem
One of the most popular blog posts I have written is called "I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem". In it, I rant against service providers trying to lock their customers into a monoculture. Companies are always looking for the edge which will make them stand out - they think that restricting what their…
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The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)
I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. Predictably, the move caused …
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Dude, you broke the future
Back to: PSA: Please don't nominate the Laundry Files for a Best Series Hugo Award (this year) | Forward to: New Book Week!
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Ok Google – it's time you discovered cyclists
Dear Google. Here is a humble suggestion from us as cyclists, especially urgent in Corona times. We see how people around the world turn to the bicycle to get to where they are going and at the same time avoid overcrowded busses and trams. Here is where you both can be a part, and improve!…