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Tales from Prediction Markets
Prediction markets are fun, at least if you're making money.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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EFF Sues to Invalidate FOSTA, an Unconstitutional Internet Censorship Law
We are asking a court to declare the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (“FOSTA”) unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced. The law was written so poorly that it actually criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech and, according to experts,...
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EU businesses sign open letter against copyright directive articles 11 and 13
March 19th, 2019 Dear Members of the European Parliament, The companies signing this letter to the European Parliament are urging you to vote against Articles 11 and 13 of the proposed copyright directive. The text of the trilogue agreement would harm the European economy and seriously undermine the ability of…
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I Hate the News (2006)
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
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You are the scariest monster in the woods
We shouldn’t worry about AI destroying society because there’s something scarier out there (it’s us)
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Supply constraints do not explain house price, quantity growth across US cities
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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Where Warren’s Wrong
Senator Warren’s proposal about how to regulate tech is wrong about history, the source of tech giant’s power, and the fundamental nature of technology itself. That doesn’t mean t…
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On the destruction of America’s best high school
[C]hildren with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “eli…
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Text Embedding Models Contain Bias
As Machine Learning practitioners, when faced with a task, we usually select or train a model primarily based on how well it performs on that task. For example, say we're building a system to classify whether a movie review is positive or negative. We take 5 different models and see how well each performs this task:
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Combating abuse in Matrix – without backdoors
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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Where does the plastic in oceans come from?
Which countries and rivers emit the most plastic to the ocean? What does this mean for solutions to tackle plastic pollution?
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The reason Facebook won’t ever change
Facebook’s (much deserved) media nightmare continued this week when it came under criticism for spamming members who signed up for two-factor authentication. This was followed by charges that its P…
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The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
(Note: although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, it may make sense to think of it as Part Two of a series, beginning with The Rise of the Access Economy.) There’s a classic exercise…
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Australian PM Calls for End-To-End Encryption Ban
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia", said Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today. He has been rightly mocked for this nonsense claim, that foreshadows moves to require online messaging providers to provide law...
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Three teen sisters who win medals in coding competitions
Elene first lit up the path toward coding for her sisters Mari and Ani. We learn how the sisters have achieved so much at such a young age.
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Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
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Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
Scaling the WhatsApp online-status hack from a single contact to 5000 random phone numbers — what the data says about phone usage habits.
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I paid for Spotify playlist placements so you don’t have to
As part of my ongoing mission to throw money into thin air I decided to promote some of Corserine’s songs on Spotify. Objectives: increase monthly streams on my Spotify artist page so I can g…
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We’re asking Apple to change the advertising ID for each iPhone every month
Apple’s latest marketing campaign — “Privacy. That’s iPhone” — made us raise our eyebrows. It’s true that Apple has an impressive track recor
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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser
In Denmark it is possible to register domains with funny characters such as æ, ø and å. And we do. One prominent example is our national portal for booking Covid-19 tests at https://coronaprøver.dk . Wikipedia calls these beasts Internationalised domain names , so they must indeed exist.
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More on the NSA Commandeering the Internet
If there’s any confirmation that the U.S. government has commandeered the Internet for worldwide surveillance, it is what happened with Lavabit earlier this month. Lavabit is—well, was—an e-mail service that offered more privacy than the typical large-Internet-corporation services that most of us use. It was a small…
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