6151
A critique of Safari's influence on the web
There's been a lot of discussion recently about how "Safari is the new IE" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I don't want to rehash the basics of that, but I have seen some...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
6152
The illegal city of Somerville
Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and…
6153
Tech and Liberty
The First Amendment is not about a law, but rather a culture — specifically a culture of liberty. It is essential to tech, and in this context, Facebook is mostly right about political ads (but can…
6154
U.S. Freelance Workforce, Now 56.7M People, Grew 3.7M Since 2014
View the latest news, announcements, media coverage, and media resources from Upwork.
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Some people want to run their own servers
Open Source Freelancer
6157
Self-control signals and affords power
New research from the UC San Diego Rady School of Management and Texas A&M University finds that having self-control is often what leads to power.
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The 100k whys of AI
One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.
6160
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
6161
British hackers: stop voting for lizards; start voting for people today
In So Long and Thank for All The Fish, the elegiac fourth book of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, Douglas Adams gives us this conversation between Arthur, a very ordinary Earth…
6162
Australia's weird little time zone (2008)
One tiny corner of Australia recognises "Australian Central Western Standard Time" (ACWST), an unofficial zone based on the quarter hour.
6163
China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve
Fighting censorship with technology since 2011. We use AI to monitor censorship and expand free speech worldwide.
6164
When the business model is the privacy violation
Sometimes, when we worry about data privacy, we’re worried that data might fall into the wrong hands or be misused for unintended purposes. If I’m considering participating in a medical study, I’d want to know if insurance companies will obtain the data and use it against me. In these scenarios, we should look for…
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Controversial pesticide research all but vanished from a major conference
During hundreds of sessions, a significant topic went missing: scholarly research on one of Corteva’s products – neonicotinoids.
6167
The Macroeconomics of Chinese kleptocracy
China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what ...
6168
Tor in 2022
It has become a tradition for me to write a blog post at the end of each year, sharing my vision for the Tor Project for the upcoming year. Before talking about what I see for us in 2022, I want to reflect on 2021 and how this has been a year of resilience for Tor.
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Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion
There are a lot of scams out there, but one that's been plaguing bloggers like me lately is a novel twist: A fake DMCA takedown notice that's actually a link insertion scam! Beware: The notices I'm getting are very convincing-looking, complete with a fake law firm website!
6171
What a graph of 8,000 fake Twitter accounts looks like
Recently I've been plagued with Tweets saying that I'm "trending in London." As flattering as that is, it's not true. There appears to be a network of Twitter bots which are randomly repeating other people's tweets, ripping off avatars and bios, and generally causing a nuisance. Looking at the users' Twitter name, I…
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On Solitude
Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience.
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Supporting Hypothesis
Stripe is supporting the development of Hypothesis, an open-source testing library for Python
6176
On the new Snowden documents
If you don’t follow NSA news obsessively, you might have missed yesterday’s massive Snowden document dump from Der Spiegel. The documents provide a great deal of insight into how the NSA brea…
6177
"Hello John. It's Gordon Brown"
Last night the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a long statement about my Alan Turing petition that included a clear apology for...
6178
Wikipedia Workers in Britain set global first by seeking union recognition
Wikipedia workers in Britain request union recognition with UTAW, national branch of the CWU
6179
The end of the pandemic is near
All epidemics end, even the Black Death and Spanish Flu. But it won’t be abrupt, and mine may end before yours does.
6180
The Library Card Project: The Ease of Forming Anonymous Companies in the U.S.
As it happens, more corporations – anonymous and public – are established in the United States each year than in any other jurisdiction.