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Privacy Is a Human Right
Every donation between now and December 31 will be matched, 1:1, by Friends of Tor. Stand up for the human right to privacy and donate to the Tor Project today. Plus… new swag!
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,050 posts.
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Platforms want to be utilities, self-govern like empires
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the founding missions of…
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Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
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MIT and Harvard agree to transfer edX to ed-tech firm 2U
MIT and Harvard University announced a major transition for edX, the online platform for university courses: edX’s assets are to be acquired by education technology company 2U, and reorganized as a public benefit company. 2U will transfer $800 million to a nonprofit organization, led by MIT and Harvard, to explore the…
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An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to Understand what happened.Make sure everyone knows it ha…
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Building a vision of life without work (2015)
The number one question that people ask once you tell them you’re considering early retirement is: What will you do with your time?
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Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues
The Atlassian Customer Agreement governs our Cloud and Data Center product offerings under a single, simplified contract for all customers.
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Baltimore Museum of Art will host an exhibition curated by the museum's guards
In March 2022, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will present Guarding the Art, an exhibition curated entirely by 17 members of the museum’s security team.
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New Mexico is the second state to ban qualified immunity
SANTA FE, NM (April 7, 2021) – Today, New Mexico became the second state in the nation to abolish qualified immunity when Governor Lujan Grisham signed the New Mexico Civil Rights Act into law. In addition to eliminating qualified immunity, this historic legislation will allow New Mexicans – including the wrongfully…
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Web3? I have my DAOts
The promise of a decentralized and trustless future is forever just that: a promise, and in the future.
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Benzene detected in many sunscreen products
Learn how Valisure’s work in pharmaceutical quality and transparency was recognized in the U.S. Senate Aging Committee report, highlighting their collaboration with the Department of Defense and commitment to innovation.
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The Last Message Sent on AIM
In the early 2000s social media sites like Facebook and Twitter weren’t commonplace yet. Even text messages, at ten cents each, were something to be rationed. For many teenagers the primary means of communication outside school was AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). So when it was announced in October that they were…
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Dear EU: Please Don't Ruin the Root
I love Europe, and I want to see the European Union succeed. I also love the Internet, and I want to see it thrive as well. And it therefore pains me that it now appears that the European Union might inadvertently be picking an ugly fight with “The Internet”. UPDATE: I am EXCEPTIONALLY happy to report that through…
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How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub
A new article was published in The Chronicle about me running Sci-Hub, a project dedicated to providing free access to academic journals all over the world. Their goal is to present Sci-Hub and its…
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“AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing”
Geoffrey Hinton is a legendary computer scientist . . . Naturally, people paid attention when Hinton declared in 2016, “We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the…
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The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I…
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I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)
A note from the author This is an older version of this story, from 2007. Here's the latest version, from 2022. Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. "I just got this thing working....
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What it's like to be cancelled
An honest look at what it looks like to be cancelled, one year after it happened. A hopeful yet realistic message for everyone.
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Little League wants all your information
To sign kids up for our city’s Little League baseball …
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After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off
The purpose of this article is to share my story in hopes of connecting to the right people at Facebook who can help me save my businesses…
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GCC: The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not do “bounty”
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Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than TVs themselves
In the simplistic account of what many call "surveillance capitalism," the original sin was swapping our attention for free content, summed up in the pithy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
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It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere
Monetary Policy 3 created a self-reinforcing demand explosion that is getting harder, not easier, for supply to keep up with.
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Sealed U.S. Court Records Exposed in SolarWinds Breach
The ongoing breach affecting thousands of organizations that relied on backdoored products by network software firm SolarWinds may have jeopardized the privacy of countless sealed court documents on file with the U.S. federal court system, according to a memo released Wednesday by the Administrative Office (AO) of the…
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Bigger vehicles are directly resulting in more deaths of people walking
Smart growth is an approach to community design that connects housing, transportation, and land use to create healthy, prosperous, and resilient neighborhoods.