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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both …
There is a classic thought experiment in the field of artificial intelligence which is often used to explain how an AI might inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity as a by-product of tryin…
Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between...
The current privacy debate is making things worse by not considering trade-offs, the inherent nature of digital, or the far bigger problems that come with digitizing the offline world.
People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.
Here it is, in the LA Times: " Comcast, Charter reach $20-billion deal, would swap customers in L.A. " Cable companies Comcast Corp. ...
Should software engineers unionize? I can’t give a simple answer to this. There are advantages and disadvantages to enrolling in a collective bargaining arrangement. If the disadvantages didn…
I’ve tried. I’ve tried several times. And every time I try looking at LinkedIn I always end up staring at it and thinking, “What is the point?”
The argument over the nano-SIM is a distraction. It's a sleight of hand designed to catch the industry off guard and fool it into doing something really stupid. The SIM is designed to do a number of things; encryption, address storage, hold SMS, etc. Most importantly, it's designed to be swappable. With GSM, you can…
Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the host for my blog) for “AI” products. In respon…
I’ve written a lot on the “War on Photography,” where normal people are harassed as potential terrorists for taking pictures of things in public. This article is different; it’s about recording the police: Allison’s predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their…
On December 17, a 26 year old Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi reached the end of his rope. An unemployed university graduate, Bouazizi had become a seller of fruits and vegetables in the southern Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When authorities confiscated his wares to punish him for selling without a license…
The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case. Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New…
This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.
