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I was emailed after abandoning a registration form. I did not click Submit
We had a baby recently and my wife and I were online shopping for breast pumps. Our health insurance...
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
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Urban trees reveal income inequality
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid
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Getting a bit creepy
I spend a lot of time working with monitoring solutions, and like to measure and track things. The information we collect from our apps tells us a lot about what’s going on. Who’s using it. How frequently they access it. Where they are from. How much time they spend accessing the app etc. And then…
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Body found in Canada identified as neo-nazi spam king
The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke , a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports.
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What Stops Female Founders?
The lack of women in tech startups seems a perennially hot topic. I’m keenly aware of this problem because I see so many founders, and so few of them are women. I’m delighted to have 6 women at...
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The Death of Quanta Magazine
Yesterday Quanta Magazine published an article written by Natalie Wolchover, Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer . I’m shocked and disappointed. I thought Quanta Magazine was the most respectable source of science news, they have published several quality, in-depth articles in difficult topics. But…
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When online commenters detect my art as AI
Here is a collection of screenshots (obfuscated) of dozens and dozens of online comments from many platforms (Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook) containing accusations or confusion that my artworks and comics are AI-generated. Despite creating every piece by hand, despite sharing timelapses, the comments keep…
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A False Economy Powered by Ads and Lies
Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet continue to post record profits despite a slew of controversies and bad press.
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Who Does Skype Let Spy?
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about power and the Internet, and what I call the feudal model of IT security that is becoming more and more pervasive. Basically, between cloud services and locked-down end-user devices, we have less control and visibility over our security—and have no point but to trust those in power…
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Historian suspended by Facebook after sharing document by Goebbels
To: Oversight Board Good day, My name is Igor Petrov, I am an independent historian. The list of my publications, including those for Cambridge University Press, is available at https://independent.academia.edu/IgorPetrov40 On August 6, 2021, whilst conducting archival research and working with…
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Kids these days: the quality of new Wikipedia editors over time
As part of the 2011 Wikimedia Summer of Research, we uncovered a possible correlation between the decline in new active editors that began in 2007 and the rise of warnings issued to new users by bo…
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Community Is Motivation on Tap
A good community can have tremendous influence on one’s motivation. I never appreciated this fact enough so I wanted to write about it here.
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Elsevier sold me a Creative Commons non-commercial licensed article
[Update 2015-03-13: I have blogged further about this here and provided a recap here. This post has been viewed over 10,000 times. Clearly some people want to sweep this under the carpet and pretend this is just ‘a storm in a teacup’ but it did happen and people do care about this. Thanks to everyone […]
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DebConf20: offer to speak in Palestine censored
If you reached this page via a link to debian.community , the page you requested no longer exists. Read on to find out why.
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How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis
In honor of today being April 20th, I thought it would be interesting to do some NLP on Reddit comments about marijuana (shout out to…
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How a Month Without Computers Changed Me
I’ve sent a message to my family and delegated my open source projects to my friends. With my last tweet sent, I turn off my laptop, phone, and tablet. My Digital Sabbath begins in 10 minutes: no digital devices for the next month.
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US government-funded phones come pre-installed with unremovable malware
A US-funded government assistance program is selling budget-friendly mobile phones that come pre-installed with unremovable malicious apps.
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Latent Space as a New Medium
Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code?
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The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
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Indian Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested
Updates:8/28Alex Halderman: Indian E-Voting Researcher Freed After Seven Days in Police Custody 8/26Alex Halderman: Indian E-Voting Researcher Remains in Police Custody 8/24Ed Felten: It’s Time for India to Face its E-Voting Problem 8/22Rop Gonggrijp: Hari is in jail :-( About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about…
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Our brief in support of Twitter's First Amendment suit against the US government
Yesterday, NYU Technology Law & Policy Clinic filed a legal brief on behalf of Freedom of the Press Foundation in Twitter's important lawsuit against the government for violating their First Amendment rights.Buoyed by the Snowden disclosures that began eighteen months ago, tech companies like Twitter have been…
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Critical Thinking Isn't Just a Process
Authoritarian muscle memory and the twists and turns of lying