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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,067 posts.
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Master List of Logical Fallacies (2018)
Fallacies are fake or deceptive arguments, "junk cognition," that is, arguments that seem irrefutable but prove nothing. Fallacies often seem superficially sound and they far too often retain immense persuasive power even after being clearly exposed as false. Like epidemics, fallacies sometimes "burn through" entire…
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How Employers Get Out of Paying Their Workers
Employers illegally siphon billions of dollars out of low-wage workers' paychecks each year, but the vast majority of these crimes go unreported.
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“She doesn’t deserve to be alive”
What is success? When do you reach it? Is life different? Are you happy? And if it's not the shining golden star that it ought to be, is it still worth it?
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'Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe Meets the Koch Brothers
If you haven't seen it, my name appeared a few weeks ago in a headline next to Koch Industries
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How OpenElections uses LLMs
In the 12-plus years that we’ve been turning official precinct election results into data at OpenElections , the single biggest problem has been converting pictures of results into CSV files. Many of the precinct results files we get are image PDFs, and for those there are essentially two options: data entry or…
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EFF to court: The Supreme Court must rein in secondary copyright liability
If the Supreme Court doesn’t reverse a lower court’s ruling, internet service providers (ISPs) could be forced to terminate people’s internet access based on nothing more than mere accusations of copyright infringement. This would threaten innocent users who rely on broadband for essential aspects...
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Privacy Harm Is Harm
Every day, corporations track our movements through license plate scanners, building detailed profiles of where we go, when we go there, and who we visit. When they do this to us in violation of data privacy laws, we’ve suffered a real harm—period. We shouldn’t need to prove we’ve suffered...
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The Approval Economy
Why every purchase is a performance “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.” — Thomas Cooley About a month ago, I published what has become my mo…
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There are infinite worlds to explore
There are infinite worlds to explore.
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Law Enforcement Uses Border Search Exception as Fourth Amendment Loophole
In recent months, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have sought access to private data on the cell phones of two journalists. Such incidents are offensive because they threaten the independence of the press and pose specific risks to confidential sources. This government overreach also...
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Amazon Smile Gets a Frown
I’m pretty sure how the first meetings went almost a decade ago: “Well, we’re paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. If we pay charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, i…
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IBM's “Think” Motto in Chinese
First we have to determine what IBM means by its famous slogan. Here are some of the many meanings of "think": "ponder; reflect (on); believe; consider; cogitate; feel; deem; hold; suppose; imagine; remember; recall; conceive; deliberate; recollect; evoke", etc. Thomas J. Watson , who led IBM from 1914 to 1956, first…
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Worst-Case Thinking
At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with…
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Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure
To ensure our mission always comes first, Proton is transitioning to a non-profit structure and formalizing our promise of people before profits.
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The Fraying of the US Global Currency Reserve System
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
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The Montreux Jazz Festival archive is now online
EPFL’s Metamedia Center will soon finish digitizing the Montreux Jazz Festival archive, and an initial selection of concerts has been made available at montreuxjazz.com.
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The Mitto AG surveillanve case – or why we must never backdoor encryption
A single employee leaked sensitive data to secret services, potentially also to Russia.