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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 305 posts.
So, some people are going to hate me for this post, and I've said some of this before, but I really want to express it in more detail. I've been wanting to write something like this for a long time, and recently I think I've been in a mindset where I need to think through some of these thoughts anyway, so "here goes…
I am deeply honored and humbled by the CEO role. I’m also grateful for the messages of support. At the same time, I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla. I hope to lay those concerns to rest, first by making a set of commitments to you. More…
In between representative democracy , where voters elect politicians to make decisions on their behalf, and direct democracy , where voters directly decide the issues, lies a third model that deserves more consideration. In this model, people have the choice of either voting directly on a decision, as in direct…
Last week, I wrote a provocative opinion piece for Quartz called “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” I’m reposting it on my blog for posterity, but also because I want to address some of the critiques that I received. First, the piece itself:
I find it absurd that Google+ doesn't recognize certain names. The latest outrage was when they rejected Elaine Yellow Horse . It was only a...
I was one of the organizers of !!Con, a free conference about the joy, excitement and surprise of programming that happened two weeks ago in New York.
Estimating the size of the world’s communications.
In the autumn on 1963, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, worried at Martin Luther King’s growing influence, began tapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms. They hoped to discredit him by gai…
On a flight back to New York I read Level 3’s assessment of the latest round of the Netflix vs Internet Provider debacle. The summarized version is that basically Netflix is slow because Verizon refuses to add capacity to peer with Level 3. Fixing the situation would cost Verizon
We now know a lot about the security of the Rapiscan 522 B x-ray system used to scan carry-on baggage in airports worldwide. Billy Rios, director of threat intelligence at Qualys, got himself one and analyzed it. And he presented his results at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit this week. It’s worse than you might…
Back to: The myth of heroism | Forward to: A footnote about the publishing industry
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
The employer of one of my coding heroes, John Carmack is currently being sued by ZeniMax over unspecified IP that he may or may not have taken with him to his new spot.
I was in a Facebook discussion about “Friendly Artificial Intelligence” — this is a buzzword from the Singularity Institute people. They be...
Now and then, as I continue trying to improve my Finnish language kyky (ability), I decide it’s high time that I actually understand the...
Remember last month, when I was working on a screen saver and I reviewed all nine Hellraiser movies and made a supercut of every on-screen appearance of the Lament Configuration? As soon as I posted it, it was immediately blocked with seven content-ID matches. So I filed a DMCA fair-use counter-claim, because this…
I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.
Back to: Let's put the future behind us | Forward to: On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
I was recently recommended as a pinch-hitter keynote speaker for a Linux conference by a friend who wasn’t going to be able to present due to a scheduling conflict. She put me in touch with the conference organizers, and they reached out to me with the exciting email subject “We want YOU to keynote [conference…
