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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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As calls to ban books intensify, digital librarians offer perspective
From Texas to Virginia to Pennsylvania, there is a growing movement to challenge books in schools that some suggest are inappropriate for students. Concern goes beyond explicit content; it now includes opposition to LGBTQIA material, the history of racism, and material that may cause discomfort to readers. While…
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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4
This is part 4 of an intermittent yet always enjoyable series: • Part 1: the rise of the ancient Puebloan civilization in the American Southwest from 10,000 BC to 750 AD. • Part 2: the rise and col…
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Study: Inflammation drives social media use
Understanding and identifying when and why people use social media can inform intervention strategies that teach people when to seek connections, social support, or strengthen their offline relationships.
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The curious economics of being ripped off on holiday
I once wrote that there are two types of charges: the ones you see coming and the ones you don’t. Perhaps I was too reductive. There’s a third category: the fees that you know are looming, but the …
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My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian
Two years ago, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum. As I learned more about myself and the way my brain worked, I started to look at past experiences through the lens of this newly-found…
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People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study
Love Your Job? Someone May be Taking Advantage of You | Duke's Fuqua School of Business
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We Will Fight Until The End
Buckyballs settled their lawsuit months ago . And news of Magnicube’s settlement comes today . They’re both out of the fight.
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Mergers ruin everything
Bad merger policy is why wealth and power is so consolidated in America. But last month, two government enforcers started to turn the table on the monopolies who run our economy.
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Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"
Since its launch, YouTube’s TrueView skippable in-stream ad product has been underpinned with a single, tantalizing promise: you “don’t pay a dime” if viewers skip your ad. But turns out there’s a catch: they’ve made it almost impossible to skip the ads. This is just one of the revelations that Dr. Krzysztof Franaszek…
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The Patent Protection Racket
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have …
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Against Facebook
On the commodification of attention, the abuses of unpaid microwork and strategies of resistance.
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UN Experts Condemn the Human Rights Costs of Secret Trade Agreements
Yesterday, ten United Nations experts and special rapporteurs voiced their concern over the adverse impacts upon human rights posed by secret “free trade” and investment agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade...
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Wading Through AccuWeather’s Response
AccuWeather issued a statement regarding the controversy over their app sending location-identifying information to a monetization firm. It’s a veritable mountain of horseshit
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Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
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Lobbying
Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept?
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The Copyright Office Belongs in a Library
It's been an exciting summer for the Library of Congress. Last month, the Librarian Dr. James Billington announced he would soon be stepping down, vacating a seat he's held for some 28 years. That announcement came hot on the heels of a new legislative proposal—the nigh-ungooglable CODE Act, which...
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The EARN IT Bill Is the Government’s Plan to Scan Every Message Online
Update 10/1/2020: The EARN IT bill has been amended since this blog post was published. We still oppose the bill.Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn’t be allowed to securely...
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The Google layoffs are about personal ambition and poor leadership
How did the company that aspired to be so much more come to this?
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Who wants to be tracked?
“We value your privacy…”, the clichéd beginning of many a privacy notice. I legitimately do value my own online privacy, and whenever I read that phrase as part of a website consent banner it sounds like lip service at best. Consent banners ostensibly exist to give users control over their data & personal privacy. Far…
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