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Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook
Just over half of Facebook users have adjusted privacy settings in the past year. Around four-in-ten have taken a break from checking for several weeks or more.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 597 posts.
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South Korea has limited a working week to 52 hours, in order to stop overwork
The previous limit was almost 10 hours every single day, including weekends.
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The EU's Copyright Proposal Is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even Wikipedia
The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they...
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The FBI could have broken into San Bernadino shooter's phone without Apple
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last week released a new report that supports what EFF has long suspected: that the FBI’s legal fight with Apple in 2016 to create backdoor access to a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone was more focused on creating legal precedent than...
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A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
[Update: Ironically, after ascending rapidly and fostering vigorous commentary over on Hackernews, this article has been "flagged" there . Update #2: A few hours later it was unflagged and is currently on the first page of HN ] The phenomenon of deplatforming in the internet age, which includes the component of…
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I Pay for News; Why Do I Still See Intrusive Ads? (2017)
If I pay for a website, I expect to not see ads.
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The Public Domain Starts Growing Again Next Year
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make...
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Self-Crashing Cars
This article is geared towards people with a STEM background. For something shorter try this article in The Weekly Standard. Também disponível em português aqui . 💃🏽
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“It’s Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission”
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
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Wage Theft is a Bigger Problem Than Other Forms of Theft (2014)
Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies. Employers steal billions of dollars from their employees…
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Against software development
Just so, generic code is replaced by its concrete instances, which are faster and easier to comprehend (at first).
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Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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What a Real Train System Looks Like (2009)
For most Americans, the only image they have of passenger rail systems, and subways in particular, are Amtrak, the New York Metro, the San Francisco BART, and maybe some of that sorry crap in Chicago.
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My Parents Give Me $28k a Year
Not long ago, my wife, a composer, asked me if I would ever advise a student from a low-income family to pursue a career in the arts. “What do you mean? Of course.” “Really?” “If that’s what they w…
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What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of
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OpenAI Charter
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
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Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
On Saturday evening, I was disturbed to discover that our OpenBenches Twitter Account had been suspended! To be clear, OpenBenches posts photos of benches. That’s it. No porn, no spam, no enc…
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The Stack Overflow Age
I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way.
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Apple has removed us from the App Store
The RescueTime for iOS app has been temporarily removed from the App Store. This is obviously incredibly disappointing for us and all our users.
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Utility poles
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Country Time Lemonade Will Pay Legal Fees for Unlicensed Lemonade Stands
Are you thinking of helping your kid setting up a lemonade stand this summer? Apparently, some young entrepreneurs are getting shut down due to a lack of small business permits. In a very savvy PR move, Country Time Lemonade has offered to reimburse any permit fees or fines (up to $300) that are incurred while…
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How the Blog Broke the Web (2017)
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flan
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False memories, or why we’re so sure of things we’re wrong about
Felipe De Brigard is an assistant professor of philosophy at Duke, where he runs the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab. That may not sound like philosophy in the traditional sense; De Brigard’s work is at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, and is supported right now by a $500,000 grant from the Office…