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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition
In this regularly updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and deficiencies (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should keep in…
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How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative…
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No Brainer
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
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How bad are things?
One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people. I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ra…
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How MTV's “16 and Pregnant” May Have Reduced Teen Pregnancy
Apparently MTV broadcasts a show called "16 and Pregnant," in which each show tracks a pregnant teen-ager through the final months of pregna...
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TSA Sued Over New Policy to Refuse Opt-Outs
Last Friday, the TSA snuck out a document updating the “privacy policy” for the nude body scanners. On Tuesday, reports started coming in on the change, including right here. Professi…
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Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona
It was on the news this mroing, Mozilla will stop developing FirefoxOS phones , and the top Hacker News comment really resonated with me. Sure, IoT is the future, and it would be great if we had more nifty stuff there ( shameless IoT privacy plug ), but these headlines make the bad taste that I’ve had in my mouth ever…
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More people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows
People of earth, waving at Saturn, courtesy of NASA . “It Doesn't Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year”...
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Fuck the Cloud (2009)
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
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Why 451?
Today, the IESG approved publication of “An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. It’ll be an RFC after some work by the RFC Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start using it now.
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The last new subway line in Japan
On December 6, 2015, the Sendai Subway’s Tōzai (East-West) Line opened. The second line of a provincial Japanese city, this event passed entirely under the radar of the Western media and ev…
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Should AI Be Open?
I. H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons:They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the l…
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My positive experience as a woman in tech
Women speaking up about the sexism they have experienced in tech is great for raising awareness about the issues. However, when no positive stories get out, the overall picture painted is bleak, which could scare even more women away .
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Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban
Brazil blocked Whatsapp for 48 hours, which benefits Telegram, it has gained more than 1 million new users and it seems like it keeps incre...
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Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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Volkswagen and the Blame the Engineer Game
Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble. The dieselgate scandal just doesn’t seem to go away and even though the company is now under new management it seems that things are getting worse and worse as time goes by. What I really don’t get is this: Does Volkswagen actually believe the nonsense that they put out in order…
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Ghost Streets of Los Angeles
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
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The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to…
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Jury Duty
There are twelve of us left. The first thing the prosecutor did during voir dire was ask all the men of color whether we trusted cops…
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To defend the free web, save Mozilla
The latest version of this post, along with the blog, has moved. TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo! We must make sure it is funded by individuals’ donations and a diverse roster of…
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Things the media does to manufacture outrage
People are so sensitive these days! People are just offended by every little thing! Millennials, amirite?!
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The Secret Ingredient in Orange Juice
Do you buy orange juice at the store? If you do, I'm sure you're careful to buy the kind that's 100% juice and not made from concentrate. After all, that's the healthier kind, right? The more natural kind? The kind without any additives? The kind that's sold in the refrigerator section so it must be almost as good as…
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What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…