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The international standard for identifying postal items
The Universal Postal Union's S10 standard, in all its glory
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
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Public Domain Day 2026
January 1, 2026 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1930 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1925! By Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle[1]CC BY 4.0Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.[2] On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930…
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Europe's Digital Sovereignty Paradox – "Chat Control" Update
Can you build tech independence while breaking encryption?
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NSPM-7 labels common beliefs as terrorism 'indicators'
New directive targets “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” and “anti-capitalism” opinions
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Platforms systematically removed a user because he made "most wanted CEO" cards
On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store called ComradeWorkwear, announced on social media that he planned to sell a deck of “Most Wanted CEO” playing cards, satirizing the infamous “Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards” introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Per the...
846
A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash
WHEREAS , the em-dash (—) has long served as the elegant scaffolding of the English sentence, providing the necessary breadth for parenthetical thought, sudden turns of phrase, and rhythmic pause;
847
Can you use GDPR to circumvent BlueSky's adult content blocks?
In the battle between the Online Safety Act and GDPR, who will win? FIGHT! I'll start by saying that I'm moderately positive on Online Safety. If services don't want to provide moderation then they shouldn't let their younger users be exposed to harm. The social network BlueSky has taken a pragmatic approach to this…
848
Is Winter Coming? (2024)
In the 1960s, AI researchers tried - and failed - to deliver machine translation of Russian to English. Overly confident researchers, lazy journalists and far too optimistic tech utopianists all built expectations that couldn't be met. Eventually, the lack of results put a stop to the previously generous funding. The…
849
Stay Gold, America
We are at an unprecedented point in American history.
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Anti-Personnel Computing (2023)
Neologisms for the current computing era.
851
Making sure AI serves people and knowledge stays human
Today we’re sharing a human rights impact assessment on AI/ML to help Wikimedia understand effects on human rights.
852
Measuring political bias in Claude
We introduce and open-source an automated evaluation for political even-handedness, testing six models across 1,350 prompt pairs.
853
How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's
The lost art of the "Somers System" of land valuation
854
The road that killed Legend Jenkins was working as designed
When a child is killed on a street like West Hudson Boulevard, it’s not a tragic fluke. It’s the outcome we designed for.
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Cottagecore Programmers
Every programmer I know has at some point longingly expressed how “[they] want to work with [their] hands”. Some say they wish they were a carpenter, some want to be in the fields on a farm, some want to raise chickens, or milk cows. It is however inevitable that I either hear someone say it or agree with it at some…
856
Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy
Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…
857
I feel open source has turned into two worlds
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
858
Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting
The following guest post from digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now. Punch cards are a fascinating binary data storage format that aren’t…
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DHH Is Worse Than I Thought
DHH's politics are not normal. Maybe they used to be, I don't know, but as of right now the dude is way outside of what most people would consider moral or acceptable.
861
Mullvad VPN present And Then? (Chat Control is back on the menu)
Chat Control is back on the menu. To highlight the corruption behind the proposal, Mullvad VPN now presents "And Then?"
862
Why do commercial spaces sit vacant?
Instead of letting their commercial buildings sit empty, surely it would be better for landlords to lower the rent and got some use out of the building, right? Wrong. Here’s why.
863
Palantir: The Most Evil Company
At the cutting edge of dystopia and genocide
864
The Generative Burrito Test
A critical benchmark for image generation models: A partially eaten burrito with cheese, sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, salsa, pinto beans, and chicken.
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Take It Down Act: A Flawed Attempt to Protect Victims That'll Lead to Censorship
Congress has begun debating the TAKE IT DOWN Act (S. 146), a bill that seeks to speed up the removal of a troubling type of online content: non-consensual intimate imagery, or NCII. In recent years, concerns have also grown about the use of digital tools to alter or create such images, sometimes...
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Stop killing games and the industry response
Recently, there's been a European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames" which by now has hit the milestone of 1'000'000 signatures. You're still encouraged to sign it if you care about its goals and are a EU citizen, since not all of those are likely to be valid signatures, but overall this is a…
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It’s OK to block ads (2015)
Over the past couple of months, the practice of ad blocking has received heightened ethical scrutiny. (1,2,3,4) If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “ad blocking” refers to software—usually web browser plug-ins, but increasingly mobile apps—that stop most ads from appearing when you use websites or apps that would…
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Poisoning Well
An experimental strategy for contaminating Large Language Models
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Flock Now Using AI to Report to Police If Our Movement Patterns Are "Suspicious"
Company crosses a dangerous line by beginning to offer AI suspicion-generation functions
870
Bifurcation: The secret giant islands formed when rivers split
As I’m sure you’re aware, rivers usually combine together to make larger and larger rivers until they reach the sea.However, there are some exceptions: rivers do sometimes split up and flow in separate directions. These splits are called “bifurcations” (bi” meaning “two”, and “furcations” being the forks). They happen…