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What if we made advertising illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,062 posts.
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Local AI needs to be the norm
Local AI models should be the default.
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Request For Research: Basic Income
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
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Just Be Rich
No one wants to be the bad guy. When narratives begin to shift and the once good guys are labelled as bad it's not surprising they fight back. They'll point to criticisms as exaggerations. Their faults as misunderstandings. Today's freshly ordained bad guys are the investors and
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Google’s GDPR Workaround
Brave presents new RTB evidence, and has uncovered a mechanism by which Google appears to be circumventing its purported GDPR privacy protections.
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Why I’m Suing the US Government
Today I filed a lawsuit against the US government, challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 means that you can be sued or prosecuted for accessing, speaking about, and tinkering with digital media and technologies that you have paid for. This violates our First Amendment rights…
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It’s Time to Build
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one…
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Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
Some time ago, we were contacted by a group fighting against online CSAM, demanding that AdGuard DNS blocks the Archive.today website. This was only the beginning of a much larger story…
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Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
Openly sharing your work brings more attention to it, which is good, right? The answer, for me though, is often “it’s complicated.” This is what happened when I went to visit a giant tech company, in hopes for collaboration, but later found that they tried to patent some of my research instead!
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Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
The design of "technical interviews" is hurting the tech sector.
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LLM Inevitabilism
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing…
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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
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Richard M. Stallman resigns
The board will be conducting a search for a new president, beginning immediately. Further details of the search will be published on fsf.org.
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UC terminates subscriptions with Elsevier in push for open access
As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC…
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GitHub is fully available in Iran
All developers should be free to use GitHub, no matter where they live. At the same time, GitHub respects and abides by US law, which means government sanctions have limited our ability to provide developers in some countries the full range of GitHub services.
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Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you
Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you.
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Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
In 2025, Google gave Amandla Thomas-Johnson's data to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.
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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk because I need some chill
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Your phone is about to stop being yours
Your phone is about to stop being yours. In 2027, Google will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with them.
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It Can Happen to You
A few days ago, a fascinating article about Grand Theft Auto Online made the rounds of the tech news ecosystem.
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We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won
We don’t plan to settle, and if brought into such litigation again in the future, we think we have a pretty good blueprint for how to respond.
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Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
Google and many others are joining together to call on the FCC to preserve the open internet. Together, we can make our voices heard and we can make a difference.
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Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post merge. Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which...
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