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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 302 posts.
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Pushback against Saudi funding endangers Silicon Valley valuations
Shifting common knowledge on Saudi Arabia has infected the narrative around SoftBank's Vision Fund, which in turn places unicorn valuations at risk.
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The reason Facebook won’t ever change
Facebook’s (much deserved) media nightmare continued this week when it came under criticism for spamming members who signed up for two-factor authentication. This was followed by charges that its P…
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How people die vs. media coverage of death
Data collection and analysis by Hasan Al-Jamaly, Maximillian Siemers, Owen Shen, and Nicole Stone.
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Massachusetts gas fires: Another technological tragedy
One Thursday afternoon last month, dozens of fires and explosions rocked three towns along the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. By the end of the day 131 buildings were damaged or destroyed, one person was killed, and more than 20 were injured. Suspicion focused immediately on the natural gas system. It looked like a…
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Apple in China: who holds the keys?
Last week Apple made an announcement describing changes to the iCloud service for users residing in mainland China. Beginning on February 28th, all users who have specified China as their country/r…
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FOSS is free as in toilet
I am a bit dissatisfied with the use of the Tragedy of the commons to represent issues with free and open source software development. It is not an abstract resource that can be depleted when overused. It is not magically maintained if left alone.
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Getting free of toxic tech culture
Hi, I am Valerie Aurora, systems archictecture consultant, writer, and cat appreciator. At Bow Shock Systems , I solve difficult systems problems in networking, file systems, and operating systems. In 2023 I moved permanently to Amsterdam after 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Why don't I take military funding? (2004)
Mostly it's a testimony that it's possible to have a successful career in computer science without taking military funding. My position has its roots in the Vietnam War, when I was a conscientious objector, did alternative service instead of submitting to the draft, and joined the Society of Friends (Quakers). During…
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But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people (2017)
I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.
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How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain
Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain"…
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The high modernism of social media companies
A Revealing Memo A couple weeks ago, BuzzFeed leaked a memo written by Facebook VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in the summer of 2016. It contained ... Read more
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The tech industry's use of persuasive techniques on children
How psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is being used as a weapon against children
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De-facto closed source: the case for understandable software
For someone who has been a strong supporter of FOSS for a very long time, watching what has been happening to the various FOSS communities over the past half decade or so is kind of depressing (with some exceptions, of course).
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The European Union versus the Internet
The EU is back to regulating tech companies, and getting the Internet wrong in the process. That, though, helps illuminate an approach that could work.
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The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth
Three points motivated me to write this — forming a Bermuda Triangle in which the average American’s savings disappear without any apparent cause. 1. Considerations on Cost Disease — the observation that certain costs (Education, Medical Care, Housing) have increased many times fas
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Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is suing Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants, have relea...
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Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system
This post will probably only make sense to those deeply involved in Mastodon and the fediverse. So if that’s not your thing, or you’re not interested in issues…
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What OpenStreetMap can be
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O’Beirne’s meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.
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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
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The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.