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I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 742 posts.
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Cancer death rates are falling, five-year survival rates rising
Cancers are one of the leading causes of death globally. Are we making progress against them?
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Hundreds of dogs in Norway hit by mystery illness
The Norwegian Food Safety Authority
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Hepatitis C kills more Americans than all other infectious diseases combined
Hepatitis C has become so widespread that experts are calling on doctors to screen all adults 18 to 79, even those with no known risk factors or symptoms.
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Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017)
UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse
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Unencrypted patient medical information is being broadcast across Vancouver
The Open Privacy Research Society is a non-profit Canadian group based in Vancouver, British Columbia. We believe that moral systems enable consent. Our society exists to invent, create, build, test, publish, deploy, promote, and to encourage the development of such systems
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My Talk at Microsoft
It is now public knowledge that on 4 September 2019 I gave a talk at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. I was invited and I accepted. The report of this has led to a certain amount of speculation and rumor.
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To protect kids, don’t send report cards home on Fridays
While talking to a pediatrician and fellow early-childhood researcher, Dr. Melissa Bright heard something that stopped her in her tracks: Child abuse spikes after report cards come out.
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If Sapiens were a blog post
A cut-down summary of Sapiens covering the major points.
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Explaining Sex Rate Changes
According to the Post, polls say 28% of US men age 18-30 report not having sex in the last year, almost 3 times as many as a decade ago.
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Wage Stagnation
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can’t guarantee I’ve understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Som…
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Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]
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The Rise of the Electric Scooter
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right? On an electric
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Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation
Business Roundtable today announced the release of a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation signed by 181 CEOs who commit to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders.
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Regulatory Capture at ICANN
This investigates the connections between organizations and people involved with policy making at ICANN focused around the effort to remove price caps from the .ORG domain registry
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Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet
I recently got an e-mail saying I had violated Twitter’s rules for hateful conduct. I immediately thought my account password had been compromised, o...
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Update on free software and telemetry
Telemetry services and GitLab. (GitLab CE will continue to be free software)
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On the death of my family's dairy farm
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on.
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Is true hacking dead? What we lost
Realtime rendering and videogame programming mostly, but I love computer science and visuals in all their forms. This is a notepad of my ideas.
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Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless
When an ISP decides to exempt certain applications or services from cutting into a user's data cap, that's zero rating. And the evidence is in that it conclusively makes broadband more expensive. A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries...
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What is energy, actually? (2011)
That’s an easy go: energy is the amount of (on) my electricity bill, or maybe of (on) my natural gas bill. If I am very concentrated, I might add that it is also the money I spend at the gasoline pump, and if I am even more concentrated I will suggest that it might have something to do with the filling up of my…
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What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?
When an ACH return occurs, the payment is reversed. This means that if you had paid someone, the money will come back to your account. Or if you had charged someone, you will lose the money you thought you received. But how does that reversal happen?
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CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978
The latest report in EPI’s annual series analyzing current and long-term trends in CEO compensation.
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Google faces first investigation by its European lead authority over GDPR
Today, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced a major GDPR probe into “suspected infringement” by Google’s DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers advertising business. The probe was triggered by a formal complaint from Dr Johnny Ryan, Chief Policy Officer at Brave, the private web browser.
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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about