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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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903

Testing like the TSA

When developers first discover the wonders of test-driven development, it’s like gaining entrance to a new and better world with less stress and insecurity. It truly is a wonderful experience well worth celebrating. But internalizing the benefits of testing is only the first step to enlighten…

912

YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form

On YouTube, there’s a long tail of content that pretty much guarantees the inclusion of every potential human interest. There are skate videos, makeup tutorials, and backyard surgical removals of blackheads. And yet the presentation of a lot of this content — especially when it’s trying to attract a large audience …

916

YouTube Ditches Flash, and It Hardly Matters

Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash. Once upon a time, this would have been cause for celebration: after all, Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, a frequent source of critical vulnerabilities that expose...

919

XMPP, a comeback story

Everyone loves a comeback story. Can a 20 year old overlooked technology make a comeback as a completely decentralized, free, and scalable technology for the growing masses of people who value freedom and privacy?

924

An update on Sunday’s service disruption

Yesterday, a disruption in Google’s network in parts of the United States caused slow performance and elevated error rates on several Google services, including Google Cloud Platform, YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive and others. Because the disruption reduced regional network capacity, the worldwide user impact varied…

930

Lessons from last week’s cyberattack

Early Friday morning the world experienced the year’s latest cyberattack. Starting first in the United Kingdom and Spain, the malicious “WannaCrypt” software quickly spread globally, blocking customers from their data unless they paid a ransom using Bitcoin. The WannaCrypt exploits used in the attack were drawn from…