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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 312 posts.
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Be Kind
Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
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I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10
Adventures in diy, electronics, programming, remote control and anything else.
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Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona
It was on the news this mroing, Mozilla will stop developing FirefoxOS phones , and the top Hacker News comment really resonated with me. Sure, IoT is the future, and it would be great if we had more nifty stuff there ( shameless IoT privacy plug ), but these headlines make the bad taste that I’ve had in my mouth ever…
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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
Personal website of Dr. Alexander Coward — mathematician, educator, and entrepreneur. Formerly at UC Berkeley, Oxford, UC Davis, and The University of Sydney.
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My Livecoding.tv account deletion saga
Update 3, Nov 2 2015 (PM): Well, it’s been…strange. First, it seems my account was finally deleted by Livecoding.tv (thank you!) After being up all night with libel posted all over it, hours after Jamie Green (the other Livecoding co-founder) and Sam Altman (Y Combinator president) replied to the Hacker News thread…
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If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear
Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date.
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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?
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It's Time to Break Up the NSA (2014)
The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission—protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies—has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era. Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the…
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How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative…
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The Case of Richard Glossip
September 2015 I used to think the debate about capital punishment was a matter of abstract questions like when it is permissible to kill someone. In practice it isn't. In practice the problem...
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Stop pushing the web forward
Fair warning. You’re going to hate this one. I want to stop pushing the web forward for a while. I want a moratorium on new browser features for about a year or so.
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Losing Sight
Léonie Watson's personal website. Writing about the web, accessibility, and other things.
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The Advertising Bubble
A few days ago VentureBeat published an article called The 7 martech buying trends shaping sales & marketing strategies in 2016 , a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity.
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My positive experience as a woman in tech
Women speaking up about the sexism they have experienced in tech is great for raising awareness about the issues. However, when no positive stories get out, the overall picture painted is bleak, which could scare even more women away .
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Ai Weiwei Is Living in Our Future
Living under permanent surveillance and what this means for our privacy
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I would have hired Doug, but...
Philip Greenspun wrote a post on his Harvard blog about MIT grads over 50 having a hard time finding work. In his post he cites a piece I wrote about how I would have hired Doug Engelbart, when I was running my first startup in the 80s. His piece is getting a lot of traffic. That's good. I'm glad people are thinking…
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A Teenager’s View on Social Media
Written by an actual teen
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We are barely halfway done
I’m kind of broken. It has been a very productive day. I have been here since 8 in the morning. We have boxed over 400 boxes of material. There have been about a dozen and a half of volunteer…
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The Secret Ingredient in Orange Juice
Do you buy orange juice at the store? If you do, I'm sure you're careful to buy the kind that's 100% juice and not made from concentrate. After all, that's the healthier kind, right? The more natural kind? The kind without any additives? The kind that's sold in the refrigerator section so it must be almost as good as…
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Get your loved ones off Facebook
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
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Goodbye, Sourceforge
This page used to be a rant about SourceForge's shady practices around circa 2015, along with some basic comparison of other hosting services.