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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 695 posts.
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Detaining David Miranda
Last Sunday, David Miranda was detained while changing planes at London Heathrow Airport by British authorities for nine hours under a controversial British law—the maximum time allowable without making an arrest. There has been much made of the fact that he’s the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter whom…
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Leaving Twitter
Yesterday was my last day at Twitter. I left to start my own company. What I'll be working on is v...
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On Hacking
In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
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Aaron Swartz's Legacy
It's really only in the past year or so that I had grown aware of him at all; one hears a lot of names over the course of following the industry and the Internet scene, and I'd naturally heard of him. But it was only recently that I had come to realize that I kept hearing about him in matters that were of particular…
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We’re Being Sued For Linking To Shopzilla
(image) If you like crime stories, you’ll love this. ‘True Crime: Hammersmith’ is the story of a deranged criminal organisation […]
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Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11
People commented about a point I made in a recent essay: In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes. Yes, that’s wrong. Where I said “months,” I should have…
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Where my mouth is
For many years, i've been convinced that programming needs to move forward and abandon the Algol family of languages that, still today, dampens the field. And that that forward direction has been signalled for decades by (mostly) functional, possibly dyna...
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The Prosecution of Aaron: A Response to Orin Kerr
Aaron Swartz committed suicide last week. He was 26, a genius and my friend. Not a really good friend, but someone I had worked with off and on for 11 years, liked a lot, had laughed with frequently, occasionally shaken my head over and deeply admired. When I first met him he looked like this.
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This Page Is Why The Internet Sucks
James Bond was orginally called Barry Clams [Note: Typo in original headline at post time.] Go look at it. According to Letter Count, the entire item people are meant to read — including head…
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Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic?
If you think someone is asking a rhetorical question, it is usually most interesting to treat it as though it is a legitimate question. Especially if we’re talking about something hard — driving down to underlying assumptions through this questioning process is interesting.
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Everybody Let's Stop the TPP: Share These Videos and Spread the Word
President Obama was scheduled to meet with the leaders of the other eleven countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Bali, supposedly to plan the “end-game” for this massive trade deal. However, he has made a...
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The sorry state of neighbourhood design in America: a mother writes
A mother who moved to the USA from Germany paints a depressing picture of the car-dependence of American neighbourhoods.
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"TLDR" is unnecessary
If you summarize your idea in your first sentence, writing "TLDR" is superfluous. The English Language already has tools to summarize and communicate your thoughts. Leverage existing conventions, which are accepted by a larger population, and you will engage more users and succeed in communicating your idea. "TLDR"…
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How blind people use Instagram [video]
Tommy Edison shows how he uses Instagram on the iPhone. So we’ll just take a picture of the crew. Why I’m holding the thing up to my face like I can look throug
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What I've Been Thinking About
I’m starting to think about my next book, which will be about power and the Internet—from the perspective of security. My objective will be to describe current trends, explain where those trends are leading us, and discuss alternatives for avoiding that outcome. Many of my recent essays have touched on various facets…