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Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
During the pandemic, I deleted most of my social media accounts. While social networks started as a great way to stay in touch - the websites evolved into addic...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,047 posts.
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Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours
Will Californians across the state soon be saying “Thank God it’s Thursday” as they look forward to a mandated three-day weekend all year round? Efforts to reduce work time have regained steam with the California Legislature’s introduction of a bill to reduce the standard workweek to 32 hours – without sacrificing…
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We built a secret apartment in the mall (2007)
Starting in 2003 I committed to the idea of creating a luxury apartment in the mall. Over the course of the years to come I systematically coordinated the movement of the core elements that start to define a home. The space in the mall achieved a base-level of comfort, with enough amenities to qualify itself as a…
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Dr. Whitehurst and the FBI Lab Scandal (2017)
When Dr. Frederic Whitehurst initially blew the whistle on the systemic forensic fraud in the FBI crime lab, he could never have known it was the start of a lifelong fight for government accountability. In 1994, he reported his concerns with FBI lab practices internally. It was “alterations of reports, alterations of…
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Web 3 is Flawed
My opinions on Web3 and why it is flawed
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Grad students at Northeastern pushed back against invasive digital surveillance
This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It's a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the "shitty technology adoption curve."
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Fog Revealed: A guided tour of how cops can browse your location data
In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through…
639
The singularity is close?
Or "Why we're all in denial about the robot apocalypse"
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Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
...but decentralization is right behind it.
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What is the web revival?
Hello, brave netizen! If you’ve found your way onto this guide then you have embarked on the first exciting step into the Web Revival. This guide will give you the low down on all things web! By the end of it you’ll know what the Web Revival is, what it stands for, and how you can take part in it; grab your browser…
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Patina and Intimacy
“Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe.”
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UK telecom EE blocks archive.org
Well at first that looks weird. It pings and all so I jump to incognito mode, and…
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Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science
Some of the forces blocking really new ideas in science
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Mystery Blips
A young operations engineer learns a lesson about creative debugging
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The Agony of Eros: Dating
This is the first post in a series where I explore how love hurts and why.
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The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value
In the neverending debate surrounding Twitter under Elon Musk, the distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value can get confused.
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Wildfire smoke is exposing millions of Americans to extreme pollution levels
Stanford researchers have developed an AI model for predicting dangerous particle pollution to help track the American West’s rapidly worsening wildfire smoke. The detailed results show millions of Americans are routinely exposed to pollution at levels rarely seen just a decade ago.
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One does not simply destroy a nuclear weapon
It's the isotopes...
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Fetish tabooness vs. popularity
~250 fetishes, graphed for your pleasure
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Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are
If you go out seeking to learn why blockchains and the systems built atop them are apparently the future of our web, you’ll begin to see some common themes. These fall apart under further scrutiny.
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Global Encryption Day: Demand End-to-End Encryption in DMs
Today is Global Encryption Day, a day to highlight why encryption is critical for a safe, private internet.
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Crimes against transhumanity
(Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)
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Books That Changed How I Hear Music
But none of them are music books
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