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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Rick Falkvinge: Why free speech is harmed by the ban on child porn
Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring...
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Is Hacker News a good predictor of future tech trends?
I set out to investigate whether Hacker News is a useful barometer for up-and-coming technologies that will hit the mainstream within the next few years.
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Thoughtcrime
Back to: The Ultimate Tech Frontier: Your Brain | Forward to: The Evil Business Plan of Evil (and misery for all)
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I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Ecosystem
I was chatting with a friend who expressed what I'm finding is a fairly common opinion. Well, yes, I'd love to move to Android - but all my content is in iTunes. I discovered that it wasn't apps which were the problem - buying them again is a pain, but most are free. It's media content which traps people into staying…
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Everything is amazing, but nothing is ours
Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and no…
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Lockheed is now tracking phones and walkie-talkies from space
Space-based phone location-tracking firm HawkEye 360 announced its partnership with U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin this morning. The UAE military is allegedly a "strong" customer.
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How the US Treasury imposes sanctions on me and every other "Stephen Law"
Right, here's another thing I am getting off my chest - email letter to OFAC (edited slightly from version sent). Dear OFAC This corresp...
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Visiting Chelsea Manning in prison
On the day that I am scheduled to see my friend Chelsea for the first time in six years, I wake up at 4:51pm to a shrieking fire alarm in my hotel room. Semi-conscious and disoriented, I leap out of bed and spin around wildly grabbing at all the things I care about – my phone and passport, the precious slip of paper…
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Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job
I have long been a fan of Wired's coverage of privacy and security issues, particularly the insightful reporting and analysis by Ryan Singel...
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My Call to Senator Schumer’s Office on PIPA: It’s So Much Worse Than I Thought
First, let me say how fantastic it is that when you call the office, a real-live human picks up the phone and can speak to you. There’s no annoying menus, no transfers, no answering machines. Washington, please don’t ever change this.
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Beware: Windows 10 Signature Edition Blocks Installing Linux
We help you acquire the perfect domain for your site. Affordable payment options. Quick and responsive customer support available.
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'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco
The goal was equity. The result: Meh.Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for…
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BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)
Silent changes in payment methods on big creator funding platforms raise some unpleasant questions.
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What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon
“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
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Open Sauce is a confoundingly brilliant Bay Area event
This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube…
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Mentoring in Gaza's first hackathon
Engineer
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Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success
Recently I was going through some old things I had put away for safekeeping, and I found these: In 1993 I interviewed film director Ang Lee before the US premiere of his second movie, “The Wedding …
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An OCR cliche: Into his/her anus (2009)
In order to improve the quality of my transcription of the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I collate the text against the Google Books version. Although the OCR is faulty, it is helpful fo…
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Nigerian Teens Are Making Sci-Fi Shorts with Slick Visual Effects
For the past year, a group of teens in Nigeria called the Critics Company have been uploading short sci-fi films to their YouTube channel. Using a smartphone wi
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How I Pranked My Roommate with Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
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Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT
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.
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Reddit banned me for developing Geddit
Currently, I'm working as an AI Engineer @ amber . But mostly I'm an open-source software developer. That means I work on software projects that are free to use, modify, and distribute. Why? Because I believe knowledge should be free and open to everyone.
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Takkyu-bin: Luggage forwarding in Japan
Please don't roll your big bags around town
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How many video games include a marriage proposal? At least one
Also: World League Basketball
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The Open Web Is Dying
It\'s difficult to comprehend that there would be anything else more important right now than public health and the COVID-19 pandemic, but in the midst of it all
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False claims in a widely-cited paper
A couple months ago we had a post, This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it. which was about…