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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
For most Americans, the only image they have of passenger rail systems, and subways in particular, are Amtrak, the New York Metro, the San Francisco BART, and maybe some of that sorry crap in Chicago.
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…
We all learned in science class that water freezes at 0 °C or 32 °F at atmospheric pressure. But what water, exactly? Even after you distill out all the dissolved salts and minerals to get pure H2O…
When I was 5, I saw the Karate Kid. I saw that bad guys could beat me up, and I had no recourse if I didn't know karate. I promptly signed up for martial arts classes.
Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to…
I grew up on a farm outside of a rural town about an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. Like many small towns in America, my town knows “brain drain” – all of my friends from high school who went to college (~30% of my class) now live elsewhere, although most are pretty close by (e.g., several live in the suburbs of…
Which books on GoodReads are most difficult to finish? Estimating proportions in December 2019 gives an entirely different result than absolute counts.
NHS England has confirmed that it will investigate whether Palantir violated the terms of its contract to run the Federated Data Platform, after the tech giant covertly launched an influencer campaign which targeted Good Law Project.
On both sides of Atlantic the debate around strong cryptography frequently resurfaces. Proponents of weakening cryptography or introduction of backdoors (or "golden keys") cite national security. Technologists and activists oppose such proposals, citing freedoms and cybersecurity. Regulating cryptography is of course…
On August 31, 2015, I started a Ph.D. in cryptography at TU Eindhoven, working with Tanja Lange and Dan Bernstein. On December 2, 2016, I…
Update (2021-10-31): DuckDuckGo now includes results for Wikivoyage again, as do Bing and Yahoo. I have been planning a long due vacation and I was doing some research into the places I wanted to visit. My goto travel guide is Wikivoyage: it’s well organised, text-heavy (instead of slideshow-heavy alternatives) and…
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San Francisco - Federal law enforcement officers compromised the backbone of the Internet and violated the Fourth Amendment when they demanded private encryption keys from the email provider Lavabit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues in a brief submitted Thursday afternoon to the US...
If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that's an okay thing.
To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport.
Not long ago, my wife, a composer, asked me if I would ever advise a student from a low-income family to pursue a career in the arts. “What do you mean? Of course.” “Really?” “If that’s what they w…
For over a century, lawmakers have exempted politically favored organizations and industries from the tax code. As a result, the tax-exempt nonprofit economy now comprises 15 percent of GDP, roughly equal to the fifth-largest economy in the world.
Anna Debenham, based in London, UK
After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking…
Persuasion is as old as our species. Both democracy and the market economy depend on it. Politicians persuade citizens to vote for them, or to support different policy positions. Businesses persuade consumers to buy their products or services. We all persuade our friends to accept our choice of restaurant, movie, and…
A new take on Trump’s tariffs, including using a disruption lens to understand the U.S.’s manufacturing problem, and why a better plan would leverage demand, not kill it.
In January, Distributed Denial of Secrets published over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias, including American Patriots Three Percent (APIIII) and the Oath Keepers. The files were obtained by John Williams, a wilderness survival trainer who spent years deep undercover…
Consider just saying what the problem is
