Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 695 posts.
In 2009, a brilliant software engineer Sergey Aleynikov was arrested by the FBI at Newark Liberty International Airport. The allegation? He stole Goldman Sachs source code, about 8 megabytes of it....
As if the coming wave of foreign engineers resulting from the inevitable immigration bill isn’t bad enough, I saw this comment left on a Wall Street Journal article: At my recent 40th Stanford reun…
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
This went up in the iTunes store a lot faster than I expected (nice work there Tunecore), and some of you have already found it:
If you're the site owner, please check your site management tools to verify your domain settings.
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
The NSA isn't spying on you. They don't have to. They just outsource it to businesses. Back 20 years ago, there was a conspiracy theory ...
National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence…
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have …
There’s one piece of blowback that isn’t being discussed—aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade—and that’s how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US’s role in Internet governance. Ron Deibert makes this point: But…
When we posted our first year-end lists way back in 2006, the whole mp3 blog thing was still fairly new. We certainly weren't the trailblazers, but we did have the advantage of starting our little music blog before the internet became flooded with the likes of us, before services like Hype Machine and Elbo.ws were…
Moments ago, the remaining claims in my lawsuit stemming from being illegally detained at FLL airport and then lied to about the existence of CCTV video of the incident, were dismissed. The questio…
The Lecturer Training Programme (LTP) is a process that is used by the FIDE Arbiters’ Commission to ensure that those qualifying from it will have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach candidates who wish to become arbiters at FA level and above. The following have progressed to the final stage of the Lecturer…
The news is reporting about Evan Booth, who builds weaponry out of items you can buy after airport security. It’s clever stuff. It’s not new, though. People have been explaining how to evade airport security for years. Back in 2006, I—and others—explained how to print your own boarding pass and evade the photo-ID…
Aaron Swartz , now in his early twenties, rose to internet fame as technology whiz kid a couple of years ago, working on such things as W3C standards or the Creative Commons. He was also blogger behind the very successful Google Weblog. Via instant messenger, I interviewed him on Reddit, activism, Google and more.
Typically eloquent Noam Chomsky, speaking this weekend at the Geneva Press Club: My own opinion is that Snowden should be honored. He was doing what every citizen ought to do, telling. [Applause] He was telling Americans what the government was doing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Governments as I mentioned before…
I wanted to check the going rate used Nintendo Wii consoles. Sifting through Kijiji was slow and only showed me the price of things which not sold. So I turned to Priceonomics, a site which is supp…
