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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 210 posts.
MIT is indefinitely removing retired physics faculty member Walter Lewin’s online lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare and online MITx courses from edX, the online learning platform co-founded by MIT, following a determination that Dr. Lewin engaged in online sexual harassment in violation of MIT policies.
The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education"
After the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture cracked down on a community seed library, hundreds of seed libraries in the U.S. are suddenly wondering if they are breaking the law. According to PA regulators, in order to give out member-donated seeds, the Simpson Seed Library in Cumberland County would have to put…
The following email was sent this evening to the MIT community by President L. Rafael Reif.
In the latest example of a troubling trend in which companies play the role of law enforcement and moral police, Chase Bank has shut down the personal bank accounts of hundreds of adult entertainers. We’ve written before about the dire consequences to online speech when service providers start...
This Old City is your guide to smarter homeownership, offering useful advice for buying, selling, and maintaining your property with confidence.
Since its founding more than thirty years ago, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) holds strong beliefs in the freedom of information. Consequentially, freedom fighters and whistleblowers deserve our...
The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law...
The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City.
We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the is…
Last summer’s Snowden revelations not only highlighted the urgent need for surveillance reform but also severely damaged relations between t...
The Excessive Militarization of American Policing
Ignore simple physics and your appendage could be amputated by a tug of war rope.
There are many reasons to oppose tipping. Most recently, a natural experiment in two San Diego restaurants suggests that tipping actually detracts from restaurant quality.
In her blog post explaining the Brendan Eich resignation, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, writes, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we …
Being in a group makes some people lose touch with their personal moral beliefs, researchers find.
