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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 304 posts.
We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would…
We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/basic-income]: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently completed a joint PhD in Social Work and Political Science at the University of Michigan…
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a major Senate committee. Under...
Ahmed Mansoor was targeted by NSO Group, an Israel-based “cyber war” company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product.
On a recent trip to Cuba I brought with me a smartphone and hoped to get Internet access either via WiFi or 3G. I managed that (at a price) but also saw for myself how Cubans get access to an alternate Internet delivered by sneakernet.
In the “first half of 2016” (the most specific we’re permitted to be), we received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia. The subpoena required us to provide information about two Signal users for a federal grand jury investigation. We’ve designed the Signal service to minimize the dat...
Netflix is in terrible danger. In fact, these might be its last days. Oh, not today's Netflix. The Netflix you're using today is fine. It made it—got to do something daring and edgy, prove out its model, and become part of the establishment. But the next Netflix—the company so cool it makes...
“We have enormous computing power in the US government, but we need to be able to bring it to bear without the phone killing itself.” – FBI Director James Comey, March 1 , 2016.
Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of...
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
Once upon a time, there were two major browsers that virtually everyone used: Netscape and Internet Explorer, locked in a death-battle for the future of the Web. They went to enormous lengths to tempt Web publishers to optimize their sites to work best inside their windows, and hoped that users...
This morning we filed a new lawsuit in federal court against the United States government to stand up for what we believe are our customers’ constitutional and fundamental rights – rights that help protect privacy and promote free expression. This is not a decision we made lightly, and hence we wanted to share…
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
Urban Confessional: A Free Listening Movement have been Free Listening on street corners for almost a decade. How to Listen When You Disagree is a reflection on listening from the 2016 RNC, and it is more relevant today than ever before.
Microsoft had an ambitious goal with the launch of Windows 10: a billion devices running the software by the end of 2018. In its quest to reach that goal, the company aggressively pushed Windows 10 on its users and went so far as to offer free upgrades for a whole year. However, the company’s...
Today, in an unfortunate example of the overreach of the United States’ current copyright law, the Wikimedia Foundation removed the Dutch-language text of The Diary of Anne Frank from Wikisou…
Since 2013, millions of people have turned to Vine to laugh at loops and see creativity unfold. Today, we are sharing the news that in the…
Diversity and inclusion are hard, especially in tech. Doing them right means agreeing on values, setting standards, calling out bad…
