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Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
Full disclosure: my employer makes a Slack alternative. All my concerns about the use of Slack type chat services apply equally to its competitors, including my employer’s.
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 663 posts.
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Hans Rosling has died
We are extremely sad to announce that Professor Hans Rosling died this morning. Hans suffered from a pancreatic cancer which was diagnosed one year ago. He passed away early Tuesday morning, February 7, 2017, surrounded by his family in Uppsala, Sweden.
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The Depression Thing
the depression thing: a neat story about depression and mental health. By Zach Holman.
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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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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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A Thank-You Note to the Hacker News Community from Ubuntu
A huge THANK YOU to the entire HackerNews community, from the Ubuntu community! Holy smokes...wow...you are an amazing bunch! Your f...
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If you opened your PayPal account before you were 18, close it
Everyone knows a horror story about PayPal, I’ve had several painful experiences with them over the last decade, but now I’ll never have to…
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“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”
A monopoly both in search and advertising, Google, unfortunately, shows that they are not able to resist the misuse of power.
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The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem
How I temporarily cut my mom out of my social media life to reach a larger audience.
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Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen
Article removed for legal reasons, sorry. After receiving a Czech version of a cease and desist letter from a legal representative of A. F., I've removed the article. You'll find articles based on my story in “Recommended reading” below, go read them.
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Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime
EFF is fighting another attempt by a giant corporation to take advantage of our poorly drafted federal computer crime statute for commercial advantage—without any regard for the impact on the rest of us. This time the culprit is LinkedIn. The social networking giant wants violations of its...
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Affordable Care
The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect–for one thing, I think health insurance should be entirely separate from employment–but I hate the thought of losing it without a replacement for people...
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Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web
Open Source Freelancer
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DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Lost the Web, What We Learned, and What to Do Next
EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us...
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Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework . Some of their results included (lower is better):
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Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
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E Pur Si Muove
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel...
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Economics of Minecraft
anecdotes from working over a minecraft economy