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Society, Policy & Culture

The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 4,917 posts.

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64

Signal Foundation

Long before we knew that it would be called Signal, we knew what we wanted it to be. Instead of teaching the rest of the world cryptography, we wanted to see if we could develop cryptography that worked for the rest of the world. At the time, the industry consensus was largely that encryption and...

68

New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…

71

Instagram ads Facebook won't show you

Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives. This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dim...

85

How We Saved Dot Org

If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry—the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)—to private equity...

88

Helping wikis move away from Fandom

Hi! You may have seen that Weird Gloop is now hosting the official League of Legends Wiki. We’ve spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom, and turn it into something the players will (hopefully!) really dig. I also love that it got started because…

90

Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

Just over a week ago, we announced that Iranian censors had started blocking all Signal traffic in the country. As an interim solution to help people in Iran get connected again, we’ve added support in Signal for a simple TLS proxy that is easy to set up, can be used to bypass the network block, ...