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The drama in trying to convert election PDFs to Spreadsheets
Personal Blog of Mark Essien
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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Larry Page addresses PRISM
You may be aware of press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret U.S. government program called PRISM. As Google’s CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we…
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A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review ) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process :
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The EARN IT act is an attack on end-to-end encryption
Yesterday a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced a new bill called the EARN IT act. On its face, the bill seems like a bit of inside baseball having to do with legal liability for informati…
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With SESTA/FOSTA, lawmakers failed to separate good intentions from bad law
In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad LawToday was a dark day for the Internet.The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing...
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This is not the future
I thought about this when reading a mastodon post which commented on a news where a project adopted a "use Generative AI but disclose it" policy, because it is "the future" and "people are going to use it anyway".
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French bar owners arrested for offering free WiFi but not keeping logs
At least five bar owners in Grenoble, France have been arrested for providing WiFi at their businesses without keeping logs. The bar owners were arrested
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Google, Facebook, and Amazon have fundamentally transformed the web
Open Source Freelancer
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The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)
A global league table of mobile data costs. The average cost of one gigabyte (1GB) compared from over 5,600 mobile data plans in 237 countries.
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The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
Originally Published: May 2021 Inflation is a controversial and complex topic. This article looks at 150 years of data across multiple countries to provide a general idea of what inflation is, what to look for, and how to invest with inflationary and deflationary risks in mind. Read from the beginning, or jump to the…
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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple
European governments are rolling out digital identity wallets, which are to be used by citizens to access services, and to verify their age online. There is a serious problem with this: these wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple.
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Cloudflare and the Wayback Machine, joining forces for a more reliable Web
Cloudflare now populating and using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in its content distribution network application Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are now working together to help make the web more reliable. Websites that enable Cloudflare’s Always Online service will now have their content automatically…
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What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?
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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and …
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Oh, 2022
Back in December of 2016 I took a look at what the next year held in store for us. It spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here , continue with this , and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth .
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You are committing a crime right now
Are you reading this blog? If so, you are committing a crime under 18 USC 1030(a) (better known as the “ Computer Fraud & Abus...
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The Death of Daydreaming
What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time
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Graying Out
For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
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Making the web fun again
I want to make another Geocities. Free web hosting, static HTML only, 10MB limit, anonymous, uncensored.
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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
I'm Left Handed is a blog mostly about technology.
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AI makes you boring
This post is an elaboration on a comment I made on Hacker News recently, on a blog post that showed an increase in volume and decline in quality among the “Show HN” submissons. I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN…
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I just had over a thousand Euros stolen and Revolut is siding with the thief
UPDATE : Revolut has refunded me, I will update the post with more details soon.
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No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
Garbage in garbage out
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It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
PlayStation announced that they will stop making discs. People are rightfully mad about this, but it's not actually about physical media. It's about owning your games.