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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 312 posts.
A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …
This website is for sale! backfromnature.org is your first and best source for information about backfromnature. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to…
Google Chrome is not the default browser on Android 4.3+. There are now at least eight Chromium-based Android default browsers, and they are all subtly, though not wildly, different.
Greece is a remarkable country full of wonderful people, but along dimensions of development and governance, the place is plainly pretty fucked up. It has been fucked up that way for a long time, for decades at least . This has never been secret. Anyone who has visited Athens knows it has far more in common with…
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie. 1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by…
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
(Short form article, Short lecture , Long lecture , demo of a fraction of the idea of a distributed website (or paste this link in maelstrom ))
Bassel Khartabil, a leading figure in the Syrian Open Source software community, has been imprisoned by the Syrian government since...
A better map of the difference between solar and standard time, and some trivia
I’ve been sitting on this information for some time, waiting to get more research done before I publish a post. But since word has come out about how Lenovo preloads what amounts to very bad spyware on their PCs, I thought I should also just go right ahead to spill the beans on the Mac.
Glen Weyl has uploaded a new version of his paper, Quadratic Voting (written with Steven Lalley), to SSRN, which now includes the completed proofs. Quadratic voting is the most important idea for l…
Are our most valuable qualities being exploited at work? How our strengths get twisted into forming bad habits that just might kill us.
“The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” –Douglas Adams
