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People Lose Their Employer-Sponsored Insurance Constantly
If you like your employer plan, you don't get to keep it.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 742 posts.
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Elevating original reporting in Search
Google makes ranking changes to highlight original reporting.
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Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
What did Oppenheimer mean when he famously said, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds"? A foray into the Bhagavad-Gita.
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Court Rules That “Patent Troll” Is Opinion, Not Defamation
Free speech in the patent world saw a big win on Friday, when the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that calling someone a “patent troll” doesn’t constitute defamation. The court’s opinion [PDF] is good news for critics of abusive patent litigation, and anyone who values robust public debate around...
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The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic
Love to hate congestion? We’ll never fix it by obsessing over speed or traffic delays. We need to rethink our whole transportation debate, starting with this premise: it’s not about how fast you can go. It’s about what you can get to.
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There are now more people over sixty-four than children younger than five
What is the age profile of populations around the world? How did it change and what will the age structure of populations look like in the future?
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Interslavic Language
Introduction to Interslavic — Vvod v medžuslovjansky jeazy — Ввод в меджусловјански језык
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On Recent Controversial Events
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
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Let’s fix up Notre Dame with concrete and steel, but let the sun shine into it
So, here’s a story. On 15 April 2019, when the roofspace over the crossing of Paris Cathedral caught fire, I was in a pub in east London having a burger. My initial reaction was not one of an…
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Let's discuss the source for the GPLed parts of Tesla cars
It has been many years since we started working with Tesla to help them resolve their ongoing GPL violations. However, Tesla has still not provided the necessary source code for their cars (a benefit of ownership enshrined in the GPL, which Tesla chooses to use) and the incomplete versions of source they have released…
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Boeing 737 MAX crash and the rejection of ridiculous data
“Boeing 737 Max: What went wrong?” (BBC) contains a plot showing the angle of attack data being fed to Boeing’s MCAS software. Less than one minute into the […]
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GPT-2: 6-Month Follow-Up
We’re releasing the 774 million parameter GPT-2 language model after the release of our small 124M model in February, staged release of our medium 355M model in May, and subsequent research with partners and the AI community into the model’s potential for misuse and societal benefit. We’re also releasing an…
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The Web We Broke
I read something depressing last Monday, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
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German expressions that don’t exist in English
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I wonder if he would have said so if his native language wasn’t German. Whether one agrees with it or not (I personally would do so partially!), there’s some modern neuroscience that backs important portions…
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Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)
In a beautiful, rollicking piece last month for Aeon Magazine, web developer James Somers ponders the question, Are coders worth it?
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Two More Cases of Third-Party Facebook App Data Exposure
Third-party Facebook apps gather Facebook data about the people who use them. While Facebook struggles to contain these exposures, insecure third-party data practices & misconfigured cloud systems continue to leak Facebook data to the internet. See how UpGuard discovered and secured two such cases.
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Facebook Doubles Down on Misusing Your Phone Number
When we publicly demanded that Facebook stop messing with users’ phone numbers last week, we weren’t expecting the social network to double down quite like this: By default, anyone can use the phone number that a user provides for two-factor authentication (2FA) to find that user’s profile. For...
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The Mueller Report, Searchable and Accessible on the Archive
Last week, the American public finally got its hands on the Mueller report–more than 400 pages, much of the text redacted, detailing the special counsel’s much anticipated findings. Within minutes of that release, many copies of that file were uploaded to the Internet Archive. On Amazon, other outfits were charging…
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No-fly list trial: Court awards fees on government attorneys’ bad faith
Fourteen years to the day after she discovered she was on the no-fly list when she was arrested at SFO, and five years after her legal victory in the first trial of a challenge to a government no-fly order (a Pyrrhic victory as she has still been denied a visa to return to the US), Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim won a third…
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Iraq introduces nightly internet curfew
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm that Iraq has introduced a nighttime internet curfew, consistent with reports from IT industry workers in recent days. Confirmed: #Iraq has partly ...
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GitHub and US Government Developers
At GitHub, we believe in empowering developers around the world. We also believe in basic human rights and treating people with respect and dignity. Today, I wanted to share a message I sent to all employees yesterday that is related to this, as it is important that we share our views on immigration policy with the…
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Android users in Europe will be asked which browser and search engine they want
For nearly a decade, we’ve been in discussions with the European Commission about the way some of our products work. Throughout this process, we’ve always agreed on one …
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Keybase iOS Has a Backdoor?
Keybase’s iOS client has received a backdoor. It seems that Stellar, the extremely well-funded and well-marketed cryptocurrency, has struck a deal with Keybase…