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Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,062 posts.
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Media blackout after key witness against Assange admits lying
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission . Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.
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Delta Goes Big, Then Goes Home
In the face of a category 5 hurricane, Delta Air Lines meteorologists, dispatchers, pilots, cabin crew, and ground crew accomplished an incredible feat on Wednesday. As Hurricane Irma bore down San Juan, Puerto Rico, Delta sent one last flight to help evacuate a few hundred people from San Juan just before the airport…
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Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany. Big push for other national Demoscene applications and the acceptance for an understanding of digital cultures in general
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Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a major Senate committee. Under...
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Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) would improve everyone’s lives, increase our free time, empower workers, and ensure everyone has food and a roof over their head. These are noble goals, but obviously there’s a downside or it would already be implemented, right?
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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier failed to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.
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ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps
The EU is pushing legislation that would scan all our private messages, even in encrypted apps.
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Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
In the last few years, you’ve likely seen a fair few comments about monopolies in the tech industry, and suggestions for breaking them up…
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Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
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Amazon disallows pointing out paid reviews
I recently bought a webcam from Amazon (late to the party, I know), and when it came it was fine but not amazing. When I went through the packaging I saw a little card saying “send us a scree…
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Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo
I’m the moderator for our Ask A Female Engineer series, and a female engineer on the software team at YC. This is the sixth installment in a series where we ask female engineers questions and share their candid, anonymous responses. In this post, we did something a bit different: we asked engineers to answer questions…
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Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE
The undersigned NGOs condemn Meta’s decision to restrict the Facebook and Instagram accounts of independent NGOs, researchers, and civil society figures from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
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Victory Lap for Ask Patents
There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent fr…
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Bing AI can't be trusted
Microsoft knowingly released a broken product for short-term hype
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Careless People
I never would have read Careless People , Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:
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Don’t Mess with The Google
Update, 11/17 at 8pm: Google has reactivated the suspended accounts! Here is the message that they each received: "Hello Google user, Your Google Account
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What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
Here’s my story… About 20 years ago or so, I was at a Salvation Army auction one morning. They were selling of tons (literally) of junk they’d had donated to them over the last few year…
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Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
Many people in the technology startup community have very high regards for Paul Graham and Y Combinator, the exclusive seed accelerator program in Silicon Valley which has under its belt acclaimed …
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NYT journalist hacked with Pegasus after reporting on previous hacking attempts
Our forensic analysis of two iPhones belonging to Hubbard found evidence of Pegasus infections in July 2020 and June 2021. Notably, these infections occurred after Hubbard reported in January 2020 that we found that he was targeted in 2018 by the Saudi Arabia-linked Pegasus operator that we call KINGDOM.
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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
I was a contributor for OpenStreetMap for a long time, and I advocated for OpenStreetMap for a long time, but the project has stalled while the proprietary mapping world has continued to improve in data quality. For those of us who care about Free and Open data, this is a problem. In this article, I explore the…
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How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
It's just normal crime
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