9931
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
9932
9933
9934
Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future
Living under permanent surveillance and what this means for our privacy
9935
What is going to happen in 2015
Yesterday I wrote a post summing up what happened in 2014. In it I promised a post on what is going to happen. What I did not specify was how far forward I am going to look. It’s a lot easier to predict the future without a timeline on it. I think we all know, […]
9936
What Happened in 2014?
I’m not much for the rear view mirror. I like to look forward, not back. I guess that’s why I’m in the line of work I’m in. But I’m going to force myself to look back at 2014 and explain what just happened. Doing that will help me look forward (tomorrow?) and explain what is […]
9937
9938
9939
On the new Snowden documents
If you don’t follow NSA news obsessively, you might have missed yesterday’s massive Snowden document dump from Der Spiegel. The documents provide a great deal of insight into how the NSA brea…
9940
How Paul Graham Is Wrong
I love Paul Graham’s essays and his latest is no exception: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In. I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m…
9941
It’s Not Too Late for Uber to Avoid Stupid Patent of the Month
“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol As our devoted readers are aware, each month we highlight a...
9942
The Wire in HD
This tale begins and ends with a fellow named Bob Colesberry, who taught me as much as he could about filmmaking in the three or four years I was privileged to work with him. To those who knew Bob, it will provoke warm memories to say that he was not a language guy; he understood image, and story, and the delicate way…
9943
9944
9945
Did North Korea Really Attack Sony?
I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the US government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it. Clues in…
9946
Cat Litter Boxes and DRM
I bought a litter box and involuntarily signed up to a never ending subscription service.
9947
Content, Forever
Got some time to kill and want to read a meandering essay by an algorithm with a short attention span? Tell us how many minutes you want to spend reading and a starting topic, and we'll whip something up.
9948
9949
EFF in Court to Argue NSA Collection from Internet Backbone Is Unconstitutional
Oakland - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue on Friday before a federal court that the National Security Agency (NSA) is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching data that it collects by tapping into the Internet backbone. The hearing on a motion for partial summary...
9950
Multidimensional analysis of plot arcs in thousands of TV and movie scripts
Note: a somewhat more complete and slightly less colloquial, but eminently more citeable, version of this work is in the Proceedings of the ...
9951
Bioluminescent trees as an alternative to electric lighting
When people think of Registered Apprenticeship, they may picture careers in construction, manufacturing, or the skilled trades. But apprenticeship is also creating exciting career pathways in industries that keep our communities beautiful, safe, and thriving — including turfgrass management and groundskeeping. New…
9952
Federal Court Throws Out Six Weeks of Warrantless Video Surveillance
Update: On December 15, Judge Edward Shea issued his written opinion in United States v. Vargas, which you can read here. The public got an early holiday gift today when a federal court agreed with us that six weeks of continually video recording the frontyard of someone's home without a search...
9953
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
This is a really strange blog post to have to write, simply because the situation is absurd. It would be comedic, really, if the situation was not costing me money and resulted in one of my best-se…
9954
Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio
Randy Olson charts out the IQ of students by their major's gender ratio and reveals a startling trend.
9955
Negative comments
The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City.
9956
Comments on the Sony Hack
I don’t have a lot to say about the Sony hack, which seems to still be ongoing. I want to highlight a few points, though. At this point, the attacks seem to be a few hackers and not the North Korean government. (My guess is that it’s not an insider, either.) That we live in the world where we aren’t sure if any given…
9957
9958
Google News to shut down in Spain
After 9/11, one of our engineers, Krishna Bharat, realized that results for the query “World Trade Center” returned nothing about the terror...
9959
What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
When software developers write code, they often use tools called IDEs, integrated development environments, that provide contextual information needed to manage the complexity of modern software. What would such a workspace look like, if it were designed for journalism?
9960