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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 354 posts.
FBI acknowledged today that there “appears” to be an alternative way into Farook’s iPhone 5c – something that experts have been shouting for weeks now; in fact, we’ve been saying there are several viable methods. Before I get into which method I think is being used here, here are some possibilities of other viable…
An Obviously Critical Response to “Economic Inequality” by Paul Graham
Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world?
Tech is entering a period of inequality where the big winners lift the sector as a whole even as smaller companies suffer. The best example is Facebook, Google, and digital advertising.
There’s a new wave of customer empowerment coming. It’s called Justice-as-a-Service (JaaS), and you need to know about it because it benefits you – you just don’t know it yet. We’ve all...
Another day, another study purporting to find that Tech Is Sexist. Since it’s showing up here, you probably already guessed how this is going to end. Most of this analysis is not original to …
A few weeks ago I gave a guest lecture at the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. Being a Windesheim graduate myself I’ve always kept in touch with my former teachers. One of them told me recently that a lot of students want to learn more about IT security & hacking and invited me to give a…
Although I made the move to industry a bit more than five years ago, I still serve on program committees and review articles for journals a...
Epistemic status: exhortatory and personal, but pretty confidently my true belief CW: suicide mention When I was a teenager, I was depressed. And the way I thought mental illness worked, the way I…
Technowoman, one woman and her travels through a career in technology
As often happens when you say something controversial, there have been some very adventurous interpretations of the essay I just wrote about economic inequality. I thought it might help clarify matters for the undecided if I tried to write a version so simple that it leaves no room for misinterpretation. “I wrote <a…
Let's pause and discuss this for a minute.
Infrastructure investment is often seen as a good way to stimulate the economy and to provide facilities to allow the economy to grow. It's...
The Revolution Will Not Take Place in a Classroom
The Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of everything in our lives. Already you can buy Internet-enabled thermostats, light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars. Soon everything will be on the Internet: the things we own, the things we interact with in public, autonomous things that interact with…
I have lived in IRC for about 7 years. What I mean by this is that IRC has been my primary hub for reading information online and interacting with people and systems. I don't use an RSS reader, I visit Twitter and Facebook only ...
America follows the path of late Rome: Fortunes no longer arise from creating new wealth, but via exploiting privileged relations with the state.
Rewriting the rulebook on coups, time to add cyberpower
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
President Park Geun-hye issues a public apology on October 25, 2016. ( source ) President Park Geun-hye is in deep trouble. The sto...
What now for the radical left in Labour and beyond?
» Metropolitan Seattle plans to offer its voters the chance to fund a large new transit expansion program. But are the projects chosen for initial funding the right ones? Building a regional fixed-…
