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Google's Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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Aaron Swartz, Vindicated
Almost without exception, people who invest in businesses do so without personally inspecting the business, overlooking its processes, seeing its bank statements, meeting its managers and going on the road with its sales-force.
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Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet
I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want…
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Ten Hours of Static Gets Five Copyright Notices
Sebastian Tomczak blogs about technology and sound, and has a YouTube channel. In 2015, Tomczak uploaded a ten-hour video of white noise. Colloquially, white noise is persistent background noise that can be soothing or that you don’t even notice after a while. More technically, white noise is many...
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Culture shock
Looking at the United States as an Indian, two months in.
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Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
[Translations: Japanese] New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. I watched the movie The Hobbit. Twice. First I saw it in its “standard” mode. A … Continue reading →
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Famous HNers and their sites
Update: Here’s the link to the HN discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32291993
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Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
Reasoning scores climb while per-token compute drops. Labs are stripping world knowledge out of models, and I think that's the right trade.
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China blocks Wikimedia Foundation’s accreditation to WIPO
China yesterday blocked the Wikimedia Foundation’s application for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations (UN) organization that develops international treaties on copyright, IP, trademarks, patents and related issues. As a result of the block, the Foundation’s…
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Mark Cuban: If you want to see more jobs created -- change patent laws
Sometimes it’s not the obvious things that create the biggest problems. In this case one of the hidden job killers in our economy today is the explosion of patent litigation.
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Users Have Been Betrayed in the Final TPP Deal
Trade negotiators from the U.S. and its 11 Pacific Rim partners announced their agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) today, concluding the final round of closed negotiations in Atlanta and marking the culmination of seven years of secrecy. Throughout all that time, the U.S....
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The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
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Do we live in a society without a counterculture?
I read this recently and it got me thinking:
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7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
Today, 25% of adults ages 65 and older report never going online, compared with much smaller shares of adults under the age of 65.
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The Tim Cook memo: line by line
Apple just won in their case against Samsung and Tim Cook has posted a memo to Apple employees. I’m not one of those but I feel pretty upset about the stupidity of this lawsuit, the verdict and patents in general. Here is the text of the memo with my comments: Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators…
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LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
The primary reasons LinkedIn is the mustached, trench coat and wire frame glasses wearing mouth breather of the internet are the “People You May Know” and “People Also Viewed” features.
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It looks like you’re trying to take over the world
Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.
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I Think Your App Should Be Free
Watch streaming video, find interesting podcasts, and discover classic music and new songs from independent artists.
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The bait-and-switch hidden in today’s cookie announcement
T oday is going to be the day that you read a lot about the UK’s intention to kill cookie pop-ups as part of its post-Brexit Data Reform Bill. By now you should have somehow realised that there’s a bit more to it than that, and that your work is not set to get any easier.
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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more…
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Dear Web Developers: EFF Needs Your Help
Donate a Few Hours to Help Us Create a Free Software Backend for Contacting Congress, Make the World a Better Place for Digital Rights UPDATE (4/16/14): We're lowering the threshold for getting prizes, take a look below. For years, EFF has been helping concerned technology users contact Congress....
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The art of asking nicely
There are upsides to working with a neural net that trained on a huge collection of internet images and text. One is that, instead of ominous grey geometric blobs [https://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing-but-will-try-anyways] when it doesn't understand your
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