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Black currants were banned in the USA (2017)
Do you know what got black currants banned? They nearly destroyed a huge part of American forests. Find out how this healthy berry became a threat.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
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SFPD obtained live access to business camera network in anticipation of protest
New documents EFF received through public records requests have revealed that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) received live access to the hundreds of surveillance cameras that comprise the Union Square Business Improvement District’s (USBID) camera network in anticipation of potential...
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Life After Language
In October 2013, I wrote a post arguing that computing was disrupting language and that this was the Mother of All Disruptions . My specific argument was that…
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Toward policy for open-source software as infrastructure
Open-source software (OSS) sits at the center of almost every digital technology moving the world since the early 1980s—laptops, cellphones, widespread internet connectivity, cloud computing, social media, automation, all the rainbow flavors of e-commerce, and even secure communications and anti-censorship tools.
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Do open source licences cover the Ship of Theseus?
I recently downloaded a single-page HTML template for a project I was working on. I wanted a good-looking scaffold to help me getting running quickly. The code had an attribution licence which I was happy to comply with. I ended up removing about a whole bunch of the HTML that I didn't need. That also allowed me to…
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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange
Plus! The Other X; Refinancing China; The Activist Short Death Spiral; Rebundling; Fitness Bands; Diff Jobs
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Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)
Guide showing how to discover and subscribe to popular communities (subreddits) when migrating from reddit to lemmy
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Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
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Setting the bozo bit on Apple
The other day I was fighting once again with Apple Music. Not the service, the app. What I wanted to do was simple: I have some practice ...
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Swedish unions strike: Blocks mail and package deliveries for Tesla
Här publicerar vi nyheter från fackförbundet Seko.
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We've learned nothing from the SolarWinds hack
Mac's Tech Blog
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LLMs are good at playing you
Large language models seem just like humans, but some of this is in our heads.
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Fire Mark Zuckerberg
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at. Click to read DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at, by Ed Zitron, a Substack publication.
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Are mental health apps better or worse at privacy in 2023?
Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer…
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ChatGPT has trouble giving an answer before explaining its reasoning
ChatGPT is a fancy auto-complete : what it does is finding the most likely continuation of text for the text it has already printed out (or as a reply for the prompt, when it is starting printing stuff out), according to the large corpus of text it has been trained with.
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Samsung and other manufacturers disable phones bought on gray markets
In a shocking turn of events, several smartphone manufacturers, including industry giant Samsung, have taken a drastic step that has left customers outraged. These companies have remotely disabled phones purchased through gray markets, effectively holding the users’ data hostage until they buy new phones from official…
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Pizza rolls and the meaning of midcentury food
How a snacktime staple embodies a specific cultural moment
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How to Kill a Decentralised Network
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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The death of a public intellectual
Is it that time of the year again? A new intellectual minted. The loss of next few evenings watching YouTube, reading substacks? All for that sweet nectar of a novel “hot take”.
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There’s no such thing as affordable housing
Los Angeles lost a hundred thousand affordable homes in a decade. Don’t look to bulldozers to explain how.
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Drug shortages have worsened and may only increase in the future, experts say
COVID-19 snarled the US healthcare supply chain, but it was in trouble long before, experts say.
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The False Promise of Chomskyism
Important Update (March 10): On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fa…
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Russia 'Coup' Live Forecast
Russian officials have accused Wagner Group of staging a mutiny, with some calling it an attempted coup. What happens next? Monday 26 June 0700 UTC With the situation somewhat stab
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Rejected emoji proposals
Proposed emoji that didn’t make the cut.