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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,050 posts.
Digital platforms play an ever-increasing role in structuring and influencing public debate. Civil society watchdogs, researchers and journalists need to be able to hold them to account. But Facebook is increasingly fighting those who try. It shut down New York University’s Ad Observatory last week, and went after…
As the world stands today, the future of transaction privacy does not look great. The existing landscape is dominated by traditional credit companies, who over the past decade have been steadily pushing their networks for increased access to user data. They (and their data customers) are on a tra...
The internet is an excellent resource for well-intentioned guidance and answers. However, it can sometimes be hard to tell if what you’re reading is, in fact, advice you should follow. Also, some users have a preference toward using a single, trusted online community rather than the open internet to provide them with…
Recently I tried to submit an iDOS update with a few bug fixes, but then got a notification from Apple Review Team, and my heart dropped cold.
Credentials, Expertise, and Feedback Loops
Update: It looks like this problem may have been resolved by USPS, with international shipments sent May 11 or later proceeding normally. But there’s still confusion about the source of the problem, the date it was resolved, and whether it’s truly fixed. It appears it’s necessary to buy new postage to reship any…
The Biden administration is proposing that banks be required to report all transactions greater than $600 to collect more tax revenue. This policy is poised to suffocate businesses and stifle the financial privacy of Americans.
Many people see a homelessness crisis, but what does the data say? We examine different locations, rates of change, types of homelessness, and mental health and substance abuse issues.
Yet another sad story of how big companies kill small ones because of poor processes.
Poverty is falling, and it isn't because of free-market capitalism
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
I am watching a lot of investing videos on youtube recently. I like to watch them while I eat, or they play in the background while I do something else. I…
In honor of Open Access Week, and particularly this year’s theme of structural equity, we wanted to highlight a project from the Internet Archive that is doing extraordinary work promoting access to knowledge. The bad news: that project is also under legal threat. The good news: the Archive, with...
If I ask you to think of an elephant do you see an elephant in your head when you close your eyes? I don’t. Regardless of how descriptive the imagery, story or text I can’t create any pictures in m…
Originally published: December 2021 When price inflation occurs, it can be a very challenging time for everyone. In that type of environment, prices of goods and services often go up faster than wages, and the public and policymakers wish to constrain them. Historically, when price inflation becomes rampant…
Proposed algorithms that detect illegal images on devices can be easily fooled with imperceptible changes to images, Imperial research has found.
“There’s that sort of sense that many technical people will see or feel when you see something and you know what it could be, and you know it could be important, and you see companies just doing it wrong — there’s that powerful desire to fix it and do it right and show them sort of how it’s supposed to be done”
If you are on Instagram, you have been probably bombarded by Instagram Stories and notifications about new features like emojis, chat themes, selfie stickers, and “cross-platform messaging” that will allow you to exchange direct messages with, and search for, friends who are on Facebook. But the...
TL;DR: If you live in the EU or are a EU citizen, companies must provide personal data you provided or they collected in a machine-readable format, following the article 20 of the GDPR.
The most controversial and confronting of the many categories of Afghan “war carpets” made since the Soviet invasion in 1979 were those which first appeared in early 2002 and which memorialized the…
On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Royal Society Interface builds on previous research that says, that’s not necessarily true for the individual city-dweller. It turns out, bigger cities also produce more income inequality.
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How the public healthcare system in Italy is using software to support the vaccination effort is appaling. I’ve spent a good part of the last 30 years trying to convince people that software is imp…
Update on pausing “Instagram Kids” and building parental supervision tools for a safer experience for users under 13.
