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The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
Big Tech broke the internet, and this old man’s got a few things to say about it.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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Twitter to decentralize something
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.
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Internet disrupted in Russia amid opposition protests
Network data observed by the NetBlocks Internet Observatory indicate network disruptions in Russia on Saturday 23 January 2021. The outages come amid protests against the detention of prominent opposition activist ...
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The Business of Fake Hollywood Money
Making fake cash is a risky line of work -- even if it's as a certified Hollywood prop master.
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An Electronic Voting Firm Exposes 1.8M Chicagoans
UpGuard has identified an exposure of Chicago voters' personal information by an electronic voting machine firm.
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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...
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John Varley has died
. John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But...
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Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
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AT&T, Time Warner, and the Need for Neutrality
It is no surprise that a judge allowed the AT&T-Time Warner acquisition to proceed given the government’s poor case; the question is if a better case could have been made. What is ultima…
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How I attacked a fellow student
I’m a college student studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying a mixture of CS, Physics and Music. This semester I decided to take a course CIS551: Network and Computer Security, eager to learn about the field. This is the story of how as part of the course, I compromised the security of one […]
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Putting Down the Pen: Reflecting on Oryx’s Journey
By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans Dear everyone, I had always imagined 'penning' this farewell someday. You see, the journey of...
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Julia
An aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive.
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Sexy weasels in Renaissance art
Exploring the sexual symbolism hidden in paintings of weasels in Renaissance art
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Datamining Bandersnatch
You may have heard about Bandersnatch , an interactive film released on Netflix as part of the Black Mirror series. I’ve heard about it when it was released, but didn’t get around to watch it until recently, and I was surprised at how deep and thorough the implementation is. The film consists of:
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Reddit is undeleting years worth of comments and posts
Attached: 1 image Well fuck #reddit - they have just undeleted posts I made years ago that I'd removed when I did a purge a couple of years back. So Reddit didn't actually delete the data - also these videos are no longer on YT so the thumb is cached They are so fucked #gdpr…
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Why inflation is not a threat
I have just posted this thread on inflation on Twitter. It will feature in 'Money for nothing and my Tweets for free' in due course: Current debate about inflation isn’t really about whether it’s likely: it isn’t. Instead it’s about whose vision of the future is going to win. Is it...
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Stonks Are What You Can Get Away With: NFTs and Financial Nihilism
Eric Jang, "Ten Apes", Jun 19 2021. NFT "drop" coming soon. Andy Warhol once said, “Art is what you can get away with.” I interpret the qu...
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Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
Understanding “extend and pretend”
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The madness of the bailout in Cyprus
Last night the finance ministers of the eurozone decided on a bailout package for Cyprus. The small country with around 1 million inhabitants has an overstretched banking sector that is in dire straits. The primary reason for this is that the Cypriotic banks hold a lot of Greek sovereign debt – debt that took a…
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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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Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
Even the ‘successful’ contact tracing apps have fallen well below expectations, and incapable of discovering their effectiveness.
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Right to Repair: The Price Is Not Right
This article exposes the unfair reality of spare part prices. To make repair affordable, we need reasonable prices for original parts, clear acceptance for the use of compatible parts (third party, used or 3D-printed) and a solid ban on parts pairing.
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Spain will soon overtake Japan in life expectancy rankings
Spain is forecast to topple Japan from the top spot in the longest life expectancy league table by 2040, while the US continues to slip down the rankings.
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The Alan Turing Institute has failed to develop modern AI in the UK
The UK’s flagship institute for artificial intelligence, the Alan Turing Institute, has been at best irrelevant to the development of modern AI in the UK.