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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised "Online Streaming Act" comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new "Online Safety Bill" seeks to censor…
We are very sad to say that James Randi passed away yesterday, due to age-related causes. He had an Amazing life. We will miss him. Please respect Deyvi Peña’s privacy during this...
Credit cards make money through net interest, interchange, fees, and marketing contributions.
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
I did several different things while I was working on Hacker News, and these will now be taken over by different people. Kevin Hale (HN id kevin) will be in charge of design. I don’t think he plans to change much about the appearance of the site, but users will be happy to hear he has a plan to make it work better on…
The story so far: In the ‘90s the Internet was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. (with apologies to Douglas Adams)[1] There’s a new bill afoot in Congress called the EARN IT Act. A “discussion draft”
Texts on this and that.
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life.
I am signed into Facebook right now. At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen are irrelevant to me. If I scrolled down I can find 4 stories I actually care about, from a list …
A fabulously gay blind Romance author.
There is a profound tension here: english specifications intuitively feel precise until you learn better from bitter experience. (It's all in that facial expression of the last frame.)
TL;DR version: Last year, I was threatened with a lawsuit over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop. Despite my firm belief that I was legally in the right, I settled out of court to cut my losses. This ordeal was very nerve-wracking for me and my family, and I’ve had trouble writing […]
You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night.
I am equally unsurprised and upset
Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was…
Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods. The attack is ongoing and our Site Reliability Engineering team is working hard to stop it and restore access to the site. As one of the world’s most popular sites, Wikipedia sometimes attracts…
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
For 75 days straight, Costa Rica ran on 100% renewable electricity
Many iPhone owners have iMessages from years ago that they can’t access. For example, my wife and I simply want to read the first few messages that we exchanged in 2017, but we can’t. A friend of mine recently had to prove she had a relationship with someone for US immigration services, and she was able to quickly…
Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.
Recently revealed text in legal briefs tells a damning story about the company, in its employees’ own words
A use case for ChatGPT
