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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
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MIRI's Approach – Machine Intelligence Research Institute
MIRI's mission is "to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact." How can we ensure any such thing? It's a
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How Employers Get Out of Paying Their Workers
Employers illegally siphon billions of dollars out of low-wage workers' paychecks each year, but the vast majority of these crimes go unreported.
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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…
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TSA Sued Over New Policy to Refuse Opt-Outs
Last Friday, the TSA snuck out a document updating the “privacy policy” for the nude body scanners. On Tuesday, reports started coming in on the change, including right here. Professi…
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Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents
There’s a follow-up to this article, now, which explains the federated wiki angle to this more clearly.. “Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twi…
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…
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Gov. Brown Signs CalECPA, Requiring Police to Get a Warrant for Your Data
Californians can rest assured that law enforcement can’t poke around in their digital records without first obtaining a warrant. Today, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed S.B. 178, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA). After months of pressure from public interest groups, media...
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Is it futile to un-Google?
A rant on the obsession with privacy stuff.
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Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?
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Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?
Hacker News is a popular social news website, mostly covering technology and startup topics. It relies on user submissions and moderation, where each submitted story can be upvoted and commented by users, which in term determines whether the story reaches the front page and how long it stays there.
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The pace of major breakthroughs has declined
One of the prevailing narratives of our time is that we are innovating our way into the future at break-neck speed. It’s just dizzying how quickly the world around us is changing. Technology is this juggernaut that gets ever bigger, ever faster, and all we need to do is hold on for the wild ride into the infinitely…
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What Happens When You Enter the Witness Protection Program?
The history of the Witness Protection Program is full of Hollywood-worthy intrigue. It also challenges our assumptions about crime and identity.
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How to Ship a Beluga Whale via UPS
As a UPS cargo load master, Bland Matthews has been tasked with shipping everything from Terracotta Army soldiers to beluga whales.
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EFF Files Brief in Case to Hold IBM Responsible for Facilitating Apartheid
EFF defends rights in the digital world. But what about when the digital world enables violations of human rights? We think that’s important, too. That’s why we filed an amicus brief in In Re: South African Apartheid, a case that seeks to hold IBM's headquarters in New York responsible for...
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CRISPR Gene Editing
CRISPR is a recently discovered genomic tool that could potentially revolutionize genetic modification and editing, including gene silencing, editing, activating, and other crucial functions. It has made a big splash in the synthetic biology community, and mentions of CRISPR have started cropping up elsewhere in the…
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EFF, Access Now, and the White House Sat Down to Talk About Encryption
In the public battle for strong encryption, EFF has championed the voice of everyday Internet users. After all, if we can’t rely on the security of our digital communications, how can the Web continue to grow and thrive? Now the fight has moved to the Oval Office. EFF, Access Now, over a dozen...
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Government Succeeds in Stalling Again, but Jewel V. NSA Goes On
We were disappointed today to learn that a federal appeals court in Pasadena declined to consider EFF’s appeal of a ruling in Jewel v. NSA, our long-running lawsuit battling unconstitutional mass surveillance of Internet and phone communications. While we are disappointed that government’s stall...