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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,062 posts.
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Moving Forward on Basic Income
We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/basic-income]: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently completed a joint PhD in Social Work and Political Science at the University of Michigan…
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Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
This morning while perusing the settings of a bunch of apps on my iPhone, I discovered a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default: Enhanced Visual Search. (I manually disabled it before taking the screenshot below.)
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YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
We've heard consistently from our community that they value transparency when it comes to generative AI content. Two new updates will make this process much simpler and more intuitive for creators and viewers on YouTube.
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Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool
It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any…
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Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
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Fast
San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 , yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost…
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Signal Foundation
Long before we knew that it would be called Signal, we knew what we wanted it to be. Instead of teaching the rest of the world cryptography, we wanted to see if we could develop cryptography that worked for the rest of the world. At the time, the industry consensus was largely that encryption and...
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I miss thinking hard
AI has changed the experience of being an engineer, starving my Thinker side while satisfying the Builder ...
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Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
Make Search Great Again (or just kill it)
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Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat
The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some. The new rules could stop organizations like EFF,...
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Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
Signal still knows nothing about you, but inexplicably the government continues to ask.
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Reddit’s disrespectful design
An overview of Reddit's adversarial and seemingly counter-productive changes.
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On the Use of a Life
First, to dispense with the philosophical argument: Yes, this is my life, and yes, I'm free to use — or waste — it however I please; but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if this is how my time could be best spent. That applies doubly if the question is not merely about the choices I made but is rather…
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Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
An analysis of which stories are removed from the front page of Hacker News due to moderator intervention.
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Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
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The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
In a free society, people should not have their private correspondence constantly examined. U.S. lawmakers, we would hope, understand that individuals have the right to a private conversation without the government looking over their shoulder. So it’s dismaying to see a group of U.S. Senators...
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Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information produ...
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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
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How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer
It is possible to restrict Google AMP from your life both as a web user and as a web developer. Here’s how you can fight back against Google AMP.
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Delays aren’t good enough – Apple must abandon its surveillance plans
Apple announced today that it would “take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements” to a program that will weaken privacy and security on iPhones and other products. EFF is pleased Apple is now listening to the concerns of customers, researchers, civil liberties...