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Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren't Growing
Automation and offshoring are playing significant roles in the types of jobs that are growing or stagnating.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 658 posts.
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American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression
In his 2004 book Perilous Times , Geoffrey R. Stone observes that with respect to free speech rights in wartime, “Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent, imprisoned and deported dissenters, and then—later—regretted their actions.” In reality, as the timeline below demonstrates, it is not simply American’s…
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White House Source Code Policy a Big Win for Open Government
The U.S. White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering a new policy for sharing source code for software created by or for government projects. There’s a lot to love about the proposed policy: it would make it easier for people to find and reuse government software, and...
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Why I Live in IRC (2015)
I have lived in IRC for about 7 years. What I mean by this is that IRC has been my primary hub for reading information online and interacting with people and systems. I don't use an RSS reader, I visit Twitter and Facebook only ...
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Stakes Are High in Oracle v. Google, But the Public Has Already Lost
Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “...
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Great Problems: An Epidemic of Rent-Seeking
America follows the path of late Rome: Fortunes no longer arise from creating new wealth, but via exploiting privileged relations with the state.
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The UK's Proposed Spy Law Would Force Apple to Secretly Hack its Phones Too
The FBI's demand that Apple craft new software to bypass iOS's security protections has ignited a worldwide debate about a government's ability to force tech companies to sabotage their own security. One repeated question has been: will other countries, like China, demand the same powers? You don't...
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25 Civil Liberties Orgs Call for Open Hearings on Section 702 Surveillance
The House Judiciary Committee has plans for a “members only” meeting next week to discuss Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Acts, the law the NSA relies on to operate its notorious PRISM surveillance program and to tap into the backbone of the Internet, also known as “upstream” collection. While we...
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Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum
Over the past several days, a number of people have made serious, public allegations of sexual...
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Cyberpower crushes coup
Rewriting the rulebook on coups, time to add cyberpower
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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
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South Korean President Park Geun-hye's corruption scandal
President Park Geun-hye issues a public apology on October 25, 2016. ( source ) President Park Geun-hye is in deep trouble. The sto...
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Brexit wins. An illusion dies
What now for the radical left in Labour and beyond?
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Seattle is putting up $50B for transit
» Metropolitan Seattle plans to offer its voters the chance to fund a large new transit expansion program. But are the projects chosen for initial funding the right ones? Building a regional fixed-…
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Measuring how bad Twitter is
My last blog post (exposing Twitter's excessive costs) prompted horror story emails on Twitter. But the best thing sent to me was a finan...
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How I added 6 characters to Unicode (and you can too)
Edit (June 2018): Unicode 11 is released, containing the half stars. Now the wait for font support... Star characters (☆★) have long b...
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Being a Female Developer
Insights for leaders building AI systems by Andela
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A billion prices can’t be wrong
‘A “big data” approach to inflation is helping us understand the fundamental question of why recessions happen’ In the dying days of 2015 came news to set any geek’s pulse racing: the declaration o…
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Reflecting on the Right to be Forgotten
The right to be forgotten can sometimes seem complex, and discussions about jurisdiction online certainly are complicated. But should the balance between the right to fr…
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How privatization increases inequality
Inequality in the United States, which began its most recent rise in the late 1970s, continues to surge in the...
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People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads
At least, not according to Facebook data
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Why Do Famous People Get Paid $250k to Give a Speech?
The organizations willing to spend $20,000-$200,000 to hear a luminary speak include Wall Street banks, summer camp executives, and national associations of bakers.
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