New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
Segment Open Fellowship
Twilio is always looking for ways to assist and contribute to open source. See our current open source projects and learn how you can get involved.
Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex
When I joined Google a decade ago, there was hardly any discussion of diversity in tech. This was long before we published our diversity numbers or understood how import…
The US Supreme Court is hearing a case about patent law’s “exhaustion doctrine”
Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could allow companies to keep a dead hand of control over their products, even after you buy them. The case, Impression Products v. Lexmark International, is on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who last year affirmed...
Programming won’t be automated, or it already has been
I’m afraid of a robot taking my job. I don’t care about the job part much, I’m afraid of the actual robot. To replace my job it’d need to exhibit human level intelligence. That’s scary. Before that happens though, maybe some of its infantile, and less scary, brethren can make my job a bit easier. […]
CERN experiment discovers five new particles
STFC supports research in astronomy, physics, space science and operates world-class research facilities for the UK.
PSD2 – a directive that will change banking in Europe
Tieto is leading Nordic software and technology company serving banking, healthcare, and industry sectors. ~14,000 experts, €1.8B revenue, operating in 20+ countries
They Used To Last 50 Years
Now refrigerators last 8–10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades? I’ve bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950’s that still work perfectly fine. I’ve come across washers and dryers from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were still working…
I will not log in to your website
Two or three times a day, I get an email whose basic structure is as follows: Prof. Aaronson, given your expertise, we’d be incredibly grateful for your feedback on a paper / report / gr…
Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Years
America's GDP is shifting from small-town America to the cities, and at the same time the opioid overdose epidemic has hit rural states, like Kentucky and West Virginia, especially hard. As a result, from 1999 to 2015 suicides in rural America have increased over 40%, according to the CDC.
Don't Fly During Ramadan (2013)
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
Intellectual Humility increases tolerance, improves decision-making
“Intellectual humility” has been something of a wallflower among personality traits, receiving far less scholarly attention than such brash qualities as egotism or hostility. Yet this little-studied characteristic may influence people’s decision-making abilities in politics, health and other arenas, says new research…
Google won’t be able to resist listening in on your conversations
Mr Algorithm is always listeningThe advertising trial balloon from Google Home really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Okay, perhaps, the linguistic contortions performed by Google’s PR…
When ‘he’ll be kept on payroll, somewhere’ is where you are
On August 31, 2015, I started a Ph.D. in cryptography at TU Eindhoven, working with Tanja Lange and Dan Bernstein. On December 2, 2016, I…
20,000 UC Berkeley Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them
Update 12/21/2019: just looking to access these videos? Check out the @UCBerkeley channel on lbry.tv or download the app and…
Uber Driver Tip-Hustling Schemes
Uber drivers increasingly resort to aggressive tactics for tips, leading to uncomfortable experiences for riders.
Keep the Internet Open
The FCC has announced plans to roll back policies on net neutrality, and its new head has indicated he has no plan to stop soon. The internet is a public good, and I believe access should be a...
The CIA's “Development Tradecraft Do's and Dont's”
Useful best practices for malware writers, courtesy of the CIA. Seems like a lot of good advice. General: DO obfuscate or encrypt all strings and configuration data that directly relate to tool functionality. Consideration should be made to also only de-obfuscating strings in-memory at the moment the data is needed…
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
An analysis of which stories are removed from the front page of Hacker News due to moderator intervention.
A comment left on Slashdot
The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth. I don̵…
We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
12 Mar, 2017 The Web we have is not broken for Google and Facebook. People farmers are reaping the rewards of their violations into our lives to the tune of tens of billions in revenue every year. How can they possibly be our allies?
EFF Applauds Amazon for Pushing Back on Request for Echo Data
The number of Internet-enabled sensors in homes across the country is steadily increasing. These sensors are collecting personal information about what’s going on inside the home, and they are doing so in a volume and detail never before possible. The law, of course, has not kept up. There are no...