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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 338 posts.
Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
In a shamefully credulous statement, they say: Proponents of pseudonymity scored a major victory today, when Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that social networking service Google+ will begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity. According to Mashable, Google+ will be "adding…
The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
Right now, Wikipedia is busy asking for donations to stay afloat. Here’s a thought. If it wants donations, maybe open things up so that outsiders feel like they can contribute expert knowledge without wasting their time.
My offer to Google Reader
Like many others, I was curious when Google announced that it would be revamping the Google Reader UI and refactor its social components into Google Plus. To that end, I wrote a brief blog post about what I felt would be a better alternative to stripping out Google Reader's social functionality .
Honestly.com – Not acting so honestly
I hate to have my first blog post after over a year be a negative one, but I feel like these guys need calling out. I recently received an email from a company, Honestly.com, that…
Saving a Life is Easy, But I Didn't
I was reading Hacker News a few weeks ago and I stumbled on a story: Amit Gupta needs you. It turns out that Amit is the thoroughly likeable founder of Photojojo. Amit had the double misfortune to: a) have acute leukemia, and b) be South Asian. The problem with the first one is obvious. The problem with the second one…
DHS asks Mozilla to take down MafiaaFire add-on
From time to time, we receive government requests for information, usually market information and occasionally subpoenas. Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and reque…
Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction
My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription, please report that as you would report any other broken link.
Facebook doesn't like privacy countermeasures
German tech-news site Heise changed their "Like" buttons to be locally-hosted images that only transform into real Facebook "Like" buttons once you click them -- meaning that if you don't click anything, Facebook can't track you, and that actually "liking" the page requires two clicks. (Also presumably meaning that…
Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge
It's great that you aren't quitting google, but it seems like you misspoke rather than being misinterpreted. It's kind of random that you claim that people misheard the word "project" when it is easy to check the actual video and realize that you didn't say that word. Your exact quote was "I am officially quitting…
Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
StackExchange/StackOverflow is broke. Real broke. Have you tried to participate in it? If so then you know how broke it is. But for those of you who haven’t sit back and get a view into fru…
Mark Cuban: If you want to see more jobs created -- change patent laws
Sometimes it’s not the obvious things that create the biggest problems. In this case one of the hidden job killers in our economy today is the explosion of patent litigation.