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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 454 posts.
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Cameron ‘Porn’ Advisor’s website ‘hacked’ – Threatens/Libels Blogger
I’m perhaps one of the last people you’d expect to see stepping up to defend Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) but you’d be wrong because there are principles that come into play wh…
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A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist
A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 Here is an exchange between the Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine and myself this afternoon attempting to solicit my professional service…
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Goldman Sachs sent a computer scientist to jail over 8MB of open source code
In 2009, a brilliant software engineer Sergey Aleynikov was arrested by the FBI at Newark Liberty International Airport. The allegation? He stole Goldman Sachs source code, about 8 megabytes of it....
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Sucks to be an old engineer
As if the coming wave of foreign engineers resulting from the inevitable immigration bill isn’t bad enough, I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article: At my recent 40th Stanford reun…
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The Arsenic DNA paper exposes flaws in peer review
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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Jonathan Coulton strikes back by re-releasing his own song
This went up in the iTunes store a lot faster than I expected (nice work there Tunecore), and some of you have already found it:
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The Rent Seeking Economy
If you're the site owner, please check your site management tools to verify your domain settings.
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Prediction Markets
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
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Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
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The Patent Protection Racket
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have …
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Blowback from the NSA surveillance.
There’s one piece of blowback that isn’t being discussed—aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade—and that’s how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US’s role in Internet governance. Ron Deibert makes this point: But…
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Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
When we posted our first year-end lists way back in 2006, the whole mp3 blog thing was still fairly new. We certainly weren't the trailblazers, but we did have the advantage of starting our little music blog before the internet became flooded with the likes of us, before services like Hype Machine and Elbo.ws were…
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Court: Federal Law Allows Lying in TSA-Related FOIA Requests
Moments ago, the remaining claims in my lawsuit stemming from being illegally detained at FLL airport and then lied to about the existence of CCTV video of the incident, were dismissed. The questio…
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Evading Airport Security
The news is reporting about Evan Booth, who builds weaponry out of items you can buy after airport security. It’s clever stuff. It’s not new, though. People have been explaining how to evade airport security for years. Back in 2006, I—and others—explained how to print your own boarding pass and evade the photo-ID…
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A Chat With Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz , now in his early twenties, rose to internet fame as technology whiz kid a couple of years ago, working on such things as W3C standards or the Creative Commons. He was also blogger behind the very successful Google Weblog. Via instant messenger, I interviewed him on Reddit, activism, Google and more.
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Chomsky praises Snowden and condemns US hypocrisy
Typically eloquent Noam Chomsky, speaking this weekend at the Geneva Press Club: My own opinion is that Snowden should be honored. He was doing what every citizen ought to do, telling. [Applause] He was telling Americans what the government was doing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Governments as I mentioned before…
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What happened to Priceonomics?
I wanted to check the going rate used Nintendo Wii consoles. Sifting through Kijiji was slow and only showed me the price of things which not sold. So I turned to Priceonomics, a site which is supp…
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Humor: Interview with an Ex-Microsoftie Who Used to Name OS Folders
—Sure is. I thought, "This is where we'll put the programs. On the file system. And since they're gonna be made out of files, I'll stick the word "Files" on the end. With a space in the middle. People are going to be typing this all the time, so they'll want it to be as long and descriptive as possible."
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Who wrote the 'Death Note' script?
Internal, external, stylometric evidence point to live-action leak of 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 Hollywood script being real.