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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
Over the past several weeks, Signal traffic has gone through the roof. New users are signing up at unprecedented rates, and we’ve expanded our server capacity faster than we ever anticipated. It means a lot to us that so many people are relying on Signal during this difficult time. When users che...
"The conversation I'm going to have with my parents now that I've turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job," he said.
How India is losing its footing on free expression. The world’s biggest democracy is a formidable power in the IT sector. With software exports comprising approximately ten percent of India’s total GDP and a technology sector that employs more than 2.5 million people, India is poised to become a...
We aren't going anywhere.
Learn how the nonprofit community united in 2019 behind a successful campaign organized by NTEN and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Linux phones now have the hardware and software to succeed, but it is an open question whether they will become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
The Great Return: From Digital Abundance to Analog Meaning
Recent versions of Ubuntu turned on a particularly annoying feature: intrusive system notifications that warn of the pending update of a Snap managed application. Here’s an example:
New study shows that the default apps collect data even when supposedly disabled, and this is hard to switch off
Money always helps, but for the poorest, one large lump sum can last a long time. A long-term universal basic income also looks promising.
The Supreme Court issued an important ruling today in the long-running patent battle between Apple and Samsung. The appeal involved some of Apple’s infamous design patents on rounded corners. The Federal Circuit had ruled that Apple was entitled to all of Samsung’s profits from the infringing...
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
Research based at Princeton University found that poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life.
I received 3 DMCA takedown emails today, covering 7350 URLs on my hardbin.com IPFS gateway. The URLs were allegedly serving infringing copies of books. The strange part is that of those 7350 URLs, during the time for which I have nginx logs, none of them have ever been accessed , and of the ones that I checked, none…
Many college campuses are designed to be walkable and human-scaled. But living in a neighborhood like that doesn’t have to end at graduation.
The public’s right of access to court proceedings is well-established as a legal principle, but it needs constant defending. In part, that’s because private parties keep asking publicly-funded courts to resolve their disputes in secret. As we and others have written before, this problem is...
Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programs continue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassified additional information, and the President’s Review Group has just released its report and recommendations. With all this going on, it’s easy to become…
On 26 November 2021, WHO designated the variant B.1.1.529 a variant of concern, named Omicron, on the advice of WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution (TAG-VE). This decision was based on the evidence presented to the TAG-VE that Omicron has several mutations that may have an impact on how it behaves, for…
I’m the moderator for our Ask A Female Engineer series, and a female engineer on the software team at YC. In the ongoing conversation about women in tech, we hear a lot about women leaving companies and even the industry as a whole, so we decided to ask a group of female engineers…
A new way to think about brainpower.
NetBlocks metrics confirm the disruption of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on multiple internet providers in Pakistan on Tuesday 9 May 2023. Additionally, total internet shutdowns have been observed on mobile ...
