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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 742 posts.
D ystopia is all the rage these days. Not only does it make for hit television, in the form of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle , but it is the concern of many popular fiction and Internet ruminations. Indeed, it has become a weaponized term in the culture, used against Donald Trump…
We've been working hard for months , and today the Developer Survey results for 2019 are live. This year marks the ninth year we’ve published our annual Developer Survey, and nearly 90,000 developers took the 20-minute survey earlier this year.
All my professional life, I have been driven by the conviction that the unique freedom of political cartooning entails a great sense of responsibility. But something happened...
Don’t decry congestion pricing as inequitable until after you fix, or at least acknowledge, these ten other things that are even more inequitable about the way we pay for transportation.
NOTE: This post is a slightly longer version of a piece I recently published on The Federalist. Their editor asked me to cut some passages because it was a bit long, but I figured that readers of my blog would…
A big part of our job involves talking to other people about maintenance and how both maintenance and the lives of Maintainers can be improved in our culture today. Over time, we’ve noticed that different people tend to offer different explanations for why neglect of maintenance is so common. We thought we’d collect…
Yesterday, we were disappointed to learn that The North Face, an outdoor recreation product company, and Leo Burnett Tailor Made, an ad agency retained by The North Face, unethically manipulated Wikipedia. They have risked your trust in our mission for a short-lived marketing stunt. In a video about the campaign, Leo…
Electric speeds create centres everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet. ( Understand Media , 1964.) Marshall McLuhan remains ...
The world's largest social network believes it has found a way to bypass Europe’s strict privacy laws.
The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location
I was recently recommended to read the book [Accidental Empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) by [Robert X. Cringely](...
Patrick and Tyler are obsessed with progress — and they think you should be too.
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i…
Amazon, the ubiquitous purveyor of two-day delivery of just about everything, nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion the previous year and, once again, didn’t pay a single cent of federal income taxes.
By Jerome A. Cohen It’s not only “Hong Kong people” whose fate is at stake here. Anyone passing through Hong Kong airport could be detained and sent to China (compare the Huawei Vancouver extradition case). Even people who have been extradited by a third jurisdiction to Hong Kong could be subject t
A recent judgement makes it a breach of copyright to sell pre-owned eBooks. Do publishers really want to deter everyone from buying eBooks?
Hacker News buried my post on conspiracy theories in my family due to overheated discussion, not censorship. Moderation keeps the site focused on interesting technical content.
I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and u…
I was reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a day or two ago while reading Ian Bogost on Apple’s Airpods. Bogost examined Airpods’ potential long term social consequences. …
Finde Rückzugsorte abseits von Berliner Straßen
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily th…
March 19th, 2019 Dear Members of the European Parliament, The companies signing this letter to the European Parliament are urging you to vote against Articles 11 and 13 of the proposed copyright directive. The text of the trilogue agreement would harm the European economy and seriously undermine the ability of…
Senator Warren’s proposal about how to regulate tech is wrong about history, the source of tech giant’s power, and the fundamental nature of technology itself. That doesn’t mean t…
(Note: although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, it may make sense to think of it as Part Two of a series, beginning with The Rise of the Access Economy.) There’s a classic exercise…
Apple’s latest marketing campaign — “Privacy. That’s iPhone” — made us raise our eyebrows. It’s true that Apple has an impressive track recor
