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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 318 posts.
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Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality
Professor Walter Scheidel examines the history of peace and economic inequality over the past 10,000 years.
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Goodbye Mac App Store
While Jettison and HistoryHound are still supported and sold on the St. Clair Software website, I’ve pulled them from the Mac App Store. The versions that were in the Mac App Store were older revisions, and it just didn’t make business sense to rearchitect the apps to meet Apple’s current requirements for approval so…
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Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
I’m the moderator for our Ask A Female Engineer series, and a female engineer on the software team at YC. In the ongoing conversation about women in tech, we hear a lot about women leaving companies and even the industry as a whole, so we decided to ask a group of female engineers…
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Opioid makers made payments to one in 12 U.S. doctors
As public health officials combat the opioid overdose epidemic, in part by reducing unnecessary prescribing, a study shows that drug manufacturers paid more than $46 million to more than 68,000 doctors over a 29-month period.
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Dutch secret service tries to recruit Tor-admin
Recently a Dutch man with an MSc (Master of Science) at the Delft University of Technology and admin of Tor-exit nodes was approached by two agents of the Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD. They wanted to recruit the man as an informant or undercover agent, who would also infiltrate foreign hacker communities. The…
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Why we should all have a basic income
Imagine everyone getting a basic income just because they are a citizen. Read on to know how this basic income will change things in society.
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Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA
The Wikimedia Foundation’s mission is to support the communities of readers and contributors who share and consume information on Wikipedia and the other free-knowledge projects. Privacy and anonym…
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TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports
The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “speed through security” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face...
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State of Clojure 2016 – Results and Analysis
Welcome back to the annual State of Clojure survey results. This year we held steady in our response rate as 2,420 of you took the time and effort to weigh in on your experience with Clojure - as always, we appreciate that time and effort very much. And, as always, thanks to Chas Emerick for starting this survey 7…
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Portugal Bans Use of DRM to Limit Access to Public Domain Works
At EFF, we've become all too accustomed to bad news on copyright coming out of Europe, so it's refreshing to hear that Portugal has recently passed a law on copyright that helps to strike a fairer balance between users and copyright holders on DRM. The law doesn't abolish legal protection for DRM...
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Comcast Has Always Opposed Internet Freedom
Years of lobbying and litigation has made it clear Comcast wants to turn the Internet into a toll road and run the booth If you have signed onto Twitter and have been following the network neutrality debate, you've probably seen Comcast's campaign to rewrite its history of opposition to the Open...
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The Need for a Digital Geneva Convention
YouTube Video
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Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath
Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a complaint against Mozilla on December 1, 2017, claiming that we improperly terminated the agreement between Mozilla and Yah
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Help EFF Track the Progress of AI and Machine Learning
The field of machine learning and artificial intelligence is making rapid progress. Many people are starting to ask what a world with intelligent computers will look like. But what is the ratio of hype to real progress? What kinds of problems have been well solved by current machine learning techniques, which ones are…
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Comcast-Owned Vox Runs Commercial for Comcast’s $500M Snapchat Investment
Vox, effectively a Comcast subsidiary, writes a glowing explainer on why Comcast’s $500 million investment is solid and has huge upside, on the same day as the investment.
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Internet Censorship Bill Could Spell Disaster for Speech and Innovation
There’s a new bill in Congress that would threaten your right to free expression online. If that weren’t enough, it could also put small Internet businesses in danger of catastrophic litigation. Don’t let its name fool you: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) wouldn’t help punish...
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Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently...
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I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement (2009)
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 was awarded to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"
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Kids Praised for Being Smart Are More Likely to Cheat
An international team of researchers reports that when children are praised for being smart not only are they quicker to give up in the face of obstacles they are also more likely to be dishonest and cheat. Kids as young as age 3 appear to behave differently when told “You are so smart” vs “You did very well this…
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Australian PM Calls for End-To-End Encryption Ban
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia", said Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today. He has been rightly mocked for this nonsense claim, that foreshadows moves to require online messaging providers to provide law...
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There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
What is the function of a fire alarm?