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Life is not short
The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,063 posts.
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Barcode scanner app on Google Play infects 10M users with one update
In a single update, a popular barcode scanner app that had been on Google Play for years turned into malware.
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Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
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This Message Does Not Exist
It can only be discarded
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The chat control proposal does not belong in democratic societies
The European Commission is working on a legislative proposal called chat control. If the law goes into effect, all EU citizens will have their communications monitored and audited. Now is the time to stop it.
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DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest Is Hurting Open Source
A plea for DigitalOcean to stop making open source maintainers' lives miserable, once a year every year.
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Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few homes. From 2010 to 2019, rents in Austin increased nearly 93%—more than in any other major American city. And home sale…
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Universities have formed a company that looks a lot like a patent troll
Imagine this: a limited liability company (LLC) is formed, for the sole purpose of acquiring patents, including what are likely to be low-quality patents of suspect validity. Patents in hand, the LLC starts approaching high-tech companies and demanding licensing fees. If they don’t get paid, the...
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Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 73, the state’s draconian anti-VPN age verification law. The decision comes as EFF submitted our comments to the Utah Department of Commerce, detailing how forcing platforms to detect and block privacy-preserving tools…
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How big is YouTube?
How big is YouTube? It's not easy to find out, but we did two years of research and figured out how...
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Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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Save Netflix
Netflix is in terrible danger. In fact, these might be its last days. Oh, not today's Netflix. The Netflix you're using today is fine. It made it—got to do something daring and edgy, prove out its model, and become part of the establishment. But the next Netflix—the company so cool it makes...
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Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
In the context of concerns around young people’s interactions with digital technologies, the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is consulting on additional measures to prepare young people for ...
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EFF in Court to Argue NSA Collection from Internet Backbone Is Unconstitutional
Oakland - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue on Friday before a federal court that the National Security Agency (NSA) is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching data that it collects by tapping into the Internet backbone. The hearing on a motion for partial summary...
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Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
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The Other Half
On January 19th of this year, I set off to California to participate in a hastily-arranged appearance in a UCLA building to talk about saving climate data in the face of possible administrative swi…
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New York State Senate passes prohibitions on non-competes
Monumental changes to New York law on non-compete agreements appear imminent. On June 7, 2023, the New York State Senate approved two bills concerning non-compete agreements. The first, Bill No. S3100A, proposes a ban on all non-compete agreements, while the second, Bill No. S6748, proposes a limited ban of certain…
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The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
We've forgotten what community really means.
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I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.
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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
A top-down approach to addressing accidents fails to make streets safer. A local approach could change that.
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The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
Teach For America's blog—real change is within reach. Explore stories of our people, tools for making change, leadership development, and career resources.
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I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
I was curious about the 51 Franklin Street address in the GPLv2 license notice so I wrote to them as they said
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AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
If you’re willing to use AI-generated images, how do I know the text isn’t AI-generated?
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Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
In this article, the author shares their experience as an engineering manager and the challenges they faced when trying to reach alignment and prev...
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COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator
Mark Suzman announces the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard. The initiative aims to identify potential treatments for COVID-19, accelerate their development, and prepare for the manufacture of millions of doses for use worldwide.