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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
The Nymwars rage on. Over the past several weeks Google has been engaged in a very public struggle with its users over its “real names” policy on Google+, prompting blog posts and editorials debating the pros and cons of allowing pseudonymous accounts on social networking sites. But there is one...
In 2011, Ahmed Salah was a leading Egyptian revolutionary who met with ambassadors and Secretaries of State. Now he is nearly homeless in San Francisco.
Which English Wikipedia articles were edited most in 2016? Find out what captured editors’ interests.
Since its founding more than thirty years ago, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) holds strong beliefs in the freedom of information. Consequentially, freedom fighters and whistleblowers deserve our...
Mobile phones have become ubiquitous and basic communications tools—now used not only for phone calls, but also for accessing the Internet, sending text messages, and documenting the world. Unfortunately, mobile phones were not designed for privacy and security. Not only do they do a poor job of protecting your…
The internet does to the world what radio did to the world January 21, 2017 Ideas, Misc Over the holidays, I finally found the time to read Marshall McLuhan’s book “Understanding media” (I might have spent time with it during my studies but definitely didn’t pay too much attention back…
By Jakub Janovsky , Naalsio , Aloha , Dan , Kemal , and Alexander Black This list only in...
I was lucky enough to witness the beginnings of social media, working on the platforms that made it happen. I’ve also seen the decline of its first iterations and products. Currently I am witnessing the idea of a social web being perverted, weaponised and automated out of any trace of human or social aspect…
A federal court will be scrutinizing one of the National Security Agency’s worst spying programs on Monday. The case has the potential to restore crucial privacy protections for the millions of Americans who use the internet to communicate with family, friends, and others overseas.
Yesterday, Jon Skeet's reputation on Stack Overflow passed 1,000,000 . ONE MILLION. Those of you who are highly engaged with the Stack Overflow community probably have a general idea of a) who Jon Skeet is and b) exactly how amazing and ridiculous this statement is, but just to make sure we are all on the same page…
Earlier this year, we applauded District Court Judge Alsup for getting it right and holding that, as a matter of law, one could not copyright APIs. The case, Oracle v. Google, is now on appeal to the Federal Circuit, where a three-judge panel is going to revisit Judge Alsup’s ruling.We’ve explained...
Algebra is no longer being taught to San Francisco eighth graders. Is the tech capital of the world dumbing down its STEM education?
Have you heard? There's map news!
When I argue that we should bring rents down by building more housing, one kind of response I've gotten is: Why are you trying to move more people into cities? There's lots of housing available in the US, it's just not in the currently trendy cities. Instead of moving people we should be moving jobs. Why couldn't…
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Here’s a Mastodon thread from a year ago. Just a quick check on how ChatGPT’s getting on … Me: Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when? ChatGPT…
I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence. It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.
I understand why writers exhibit cowardice, but I don’t have much sympathy for them.
Elon Musk and The Enduring Appeal of “Criticism is Censorship”
As part of an omnibus bill, the Minnesota House of Representatives passed a troubling bill restricting how under-18 users engage with user-generated content (UGC) services. [At the bottom of this post, I’ve included the text as passed by the Minnesota...
It’s noisy out there. We are inundated with sensational headlines every minute, of every day. You almost could make a full-time job of sorting the fun, i
Of all the LLMs I’ve used and driven daily, Claude is the one that absolutely contradicts my instructions.
It wasn't appealing to begin with
You’ve heard of stuff like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make an account on one, and it only works there. You can’t send a DM to your friend on Twitter from Facebook Messenger. You can’t browse your friend’s Instagram feed from Twitter. Each one is closed off
In the recent Odd Lots AMA episode, financial journalist Tracy Alloway said …I coined the term ‘ China’s Great Ball of Money.’ This idea that you just have a bunch of extra money …
