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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 695 posts.
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EFF Politely Asks PTO to Stop Issuing So Many Crappy Software Patents
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued countless bad software patents. These patents tend to be hopelessly vague and overbroad. Indeed, they are often so packed with indecipherable patent jargon that software engineers have trouble understanding them. As one programmer...
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On Citizenship in open-source software development
How GitHub can revolutionize the field simply by empowering the users inside the repositories they contribute.
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The Deal That Makes No Sense
Early this morning Microsoft acquired Nokia for €3.79 billion (plus €1.65 billion for patents). It is a deal that makes no sense. While industry observers love to pontificate about mergers and acqu…
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Thrown Off a United Airlines Flight for Taking Pictures
You’ve changed almost everything. So why do the same problems keep coming back? Explore the rules, responses, and results with UPGRD®.
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Civil Liberties Groups Speak Out Against CISPA in Lead Up to Hearings
On Monday, EFF and over 30 other Internet rights organizations sent a letter to members of Congress demanding they vote no on the "cybersecurity" bill known as CISPA. The letter starts off a week in which Congress will hold three different hearings about CISPA and computer and network security. In...
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The IIT Entrance Exam
This is the story of India's Joint Entrance Examination, the yearly attempt to pick out the ten thousand most intelligent students in a country of 1.2 billion people.
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Blackmail fail
In which the author receives surprising offers from kind strangers
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Let’s help Airbnb rebuild the bridge it just burned
[Trieste, Italy, 12:02am Friday 21 May 2013 — As I say in the comments here, Airbnb has responded to this post, explaining that a bug in the system was involved. While that might patch Airbnb’…
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Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”
Data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte relates how he came to defend Aaron Swartz in the JSTOR incident and how he, Tufte, was a hacker himself.
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Edward Snowden and Gen Y: a sign of leaks to come?
(Before I begin: there are participants in the discourse who would say that we're supposed to natter on about Edward Snowden , and not the contents of his disclosures, because turning it into a personal issue rather than a political one is useful to the machineries of state. But the point I'm about to make here is…
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Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
I’m extremely excited about online education, but I’ve noticed that online education products have a really serious problem: low retention. I’ve used Coursera, EdX, Hack Design, Duolingo, Codecademy… and I’ve churned from all of them. I bet you did too!
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RMS lifestyle
I do not have a favorite food, a favorite book, a favorite song, a favorite joke, a favorite flower, or a favorite butterfly. My tastes don't work that way.
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The 1% fallacy
Here is how to make a fortune writing software: Pick a large and established software market e.g. back-up, anti-virus or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Write a new product for tha…
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Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the DoJ, You May Be a Criminal
During his first term, President Barack Obama declared October 2009 to be “National Information Literacy Awareness Month,” emphasizing that, for students, learning to navigate the online world is as important a skill as reading, writing and arithmetic. It was a move that echoed his predecessor's...
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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…