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How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
In honor of today being April 20th, I thought it would be interesting to do some NLP on Reddit comments about marijuana (shout out to…
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 663 posts.
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How Much Are People Making from the Sharing Economy?
We analyzed how much money people make from their side-gigs on Uber, Airbnb, Lyft and more.
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Riseup moves to encrypted email in response to legal requests
After exhausting our legal options, Riseup recently chose to comply with two sealed warrants from the FBI, rather than facing contempt of court (which would have resulted in jail time for Riseup birds and/or termination of the Riseup organization). The first concerned the public contact address for an international…
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A Reply to François Chollet on Intelligence Explosion
This is a reply to Francois Chollet, the inventor of the Keras wrapper for the Tensorflow and Theano deep learning systems, on his essay "The impossibility of
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Please don’t pay to use a pay toilet
Pay toilets are nasty, and ought to be illegal. Those of us who are not poor can afford the price, if we accept the practice; poor people can't. To deny people access to a toilet when they need one is nasty and degrading.
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IBM's “Think” Motto in Chinese
First we have to determine what IBM means by its famous slogan. Here are some of the many meanings of "think": "ponder; reflect (on); believe; consider; cogitate; feel; deem; hold; suppose; imagine; remember; recall; conceive; deliberate; recollect; evoke", etc. Thomas J. Watson , who led IBM from 1914 to 1956, first…
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The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women
Every year, more women than men become college-educated. The disparity is already prevalent across North America and Europe, and the trend is beginning to spread across the world more widely. At the University of Texas at Austin where I teach, the sex ratio is 54 percent women to 46 percent men. This imbalance may not…
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Thai activist jailed under lese majeste laws for sharing an article on Facebook
Thai activist Jatuphat “Pai” Boonpattaraksa was sentenced this week to two and a half years in prison—for the crime of sharing a BBC article on Facebook. The Thai-language article profiled Thailand’s new king and, while thousands of users shared it, only Jutaphat was found to violate Thailand’s...
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Terms and Conditions, the Graphic Novel
When artist Robert Sikoryak put the iTunes Terms and Conditions into graphic novel format, he tapped a familiar problem. Most of us don’t read the terms
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Four steps we’re taking today to fight online terror
Today, we are pledging to take four additional steps to tackle the problem of violent extremism online.
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How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
Many of us rely on a Qwerty keyboard, at least when we are typing at a laptop. It is often said that the Qwerty keyboard is inferior to clearly better alternatives like the Dvorak keyboard. However, this appears to be largely a myth backed by dubious science. There is the similarly often repeated story of … Continue…
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Senate Guts Privacy Rules. Will House Follow Suit?
Majority Leader McCarthy Confirms House to Immediately Act on Behalf of the Cable and Telephone Industry Following the Senate Vote Yesterday, the U.S. Senate by a razor thin margin of 50 to 48 voted to take away the privacy rights of Internet users as a favor to the cable and telephone industry....
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How I realised “Free Software” is a better term than “Open Source”
A month ago I wrote an article called "How I realised “Open Source” is a better term than “Free Software”" . Now I change my mind completely and explain why everything I said was actually wrong.
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Bill to Legalize Marijuana and Opium Cleared for Indian Parliament (2016)
Revolutionize your legal experience with Lawyered. Using technology to make legal services accessible and affordable just a click away.
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DAG Rosenstein’s “Responsible Encryption” Demand Is Bad
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein delivered a speech on Tuesday about what he calls “responsible encryption” today. It misses the mark, by far. Rosenstein starts with a fallacy, attempting to convince you that encryption is unprecedented: Our society has never had a system where evidence of...
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An open letter to the W3C Director, CEO, team and membership
Dear Jeff, Tim, and colleagues, In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem. By doing so, the organization offered...
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When the Judge Distrusts Your Lawyers
Uber is in trouble. The trial between Alphabet’s Waymo and Uber over Waymo’s self-driving car trade secrets was scheduled to begin on December 4th before Judge William Alsup, of Oracle v. Google fame. (Readers familiar with coverage of that case know how smart and tough he is). According to published reports, at the…
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San Francisco, now with more dystopia
Personal website of Caroline and Mike Hudack, angel investors and tech industry veterans living in London.
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Someone cloned my website and is using it to scam people
I was looking on the DuckDuckGo search results for "anonymous bitcoin sms" today, just to see what was out there. My SMS Privacy was the top result, as expected. But the second result was new to me: