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Anatomy of a Moral Panic
On September 18, the British Channel 4 ran a news segment with the headline, 'Potentially deadly bomb ingredients are ‘frequently bought together’ on Amazon.'
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 345 posts.
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Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker
Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor ...
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Just own the damn robots
The time has come to stop the lawlessness.
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What I Heard from Trump Supporters
After the election, I decided to talk to 100 Trump voters from around the country. I went to the middle of the country, the middle of the state, and talked to many online. This was a...
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Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you
[Note: I neither own nor have any trading position on any cryptocurrency. I was not compensated by any party to write this. The views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily repr…
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Now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality, let’s adopt it in California
Today the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality — a terrible step for the future of a free and open internet and for…
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Uber Driver Tip-Hustling Schemes
Uber drivers increasingly resort to aggressive tactics for tips, leading to uncomfortable experiences for riders.
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Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
The Practical Nomad: Edward Hasbrouck's blog
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Why I deleted my Facebook account
After being an early adopter of Facebook and using it for over a decade, I decided to delete my account. Here's why.
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LA Times and ads
The LA Times is a good newspaper and is currently doing the best political coverage in California. They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker …
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Why do so few people major in computer science?
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
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Arturo Di Modica has a point
I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago. Folks have been talking about the Fearless Girl statue ever since it was dropped in Manhattan’s Financial District some five weeks ago. …
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No politics please, we're hackers, too busy to improve the world
If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics. This is evidenced in many ways including ‘safe spaces’ and moratoria on discussing anything political because it has no bearing on the more interesting bits of…
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A comment left on Slashdot
The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth. I don̵…
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RIP the Broccoli Tree
For the past few years, Patrik Svedberg has been taking photos of a beautiful Swedish tree he dubbed The Broccoli Tree. In a short time, the tree gained a healt
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We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
12 Mar, 2017 The Web we have is not broken for Google and Facebook. People farmers are reaping the rewards of their violations into our lives to the tune of tens of billions in revenue every year. How can they possibly be our allies?
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I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream
There is much I take for granted in my life, and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things. In my 46 years, I’ve lived under nine different presidents. The first I remember is Carter. I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1992, but I
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As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
Tomorrow, two high-speed rail lines open in France, providing new corridors for trains to slice through the countryside at 200 mph (320 km/h). One is a 302-kilometer link that will connect Paris to…
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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way,
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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
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DRM Is Toxic to Culture
In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons. It’s possible that you think that unauthorised use of copyright…
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You Will Not Understand This
This is my exit interview from social media. Some of these “services” I abandoned years ago. Others I am still struggling to avoid. From experience, I assume that you, reader, will make it impossible for me to remain ignorant of developments WRT: all of this garbage. What all of this garbage has in common is that it…