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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
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Tell President Obama to support the Federal Research Public Access Act
If you’re tired of blog posts about open science, sorry dude—but it feels great to be part a group of blogging nerds who, for once, are actually having a nonzero (and positive, I think!…
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Toshiba laptop service manuals and the sorry state of copyright law
As you would be no doubt already aware, I run a section of my blog here devoted to the free sharing of laptop service manuals. This is a side project I have run for the last three years, gathering as many repair manuals as I could find on the internet and rehosting them on my website for anybody to download and use.
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Megaupload could spawn caselaw more destructive than SOPA
The GH engineers correctly identify the MySQL dependency as a problem. It’s such an easy one to remove, though!
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Stanford researcher: Google Circumvents iOS Privacy protection in AdSense ads
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple's default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking. This tracking, discovered by Stanford...
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The lifestyle business bullshit (2009)
I love when people call what we do at 37signals a “lifestyle business” — but probably not for the reasons they think. When the lifestyle card is pulled from its tired deck, it’s usually meant as a pat on top of the head. An “oh, that’s such a pretty drawing, dea…
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Results of Mozilla's SOPA blackout
Yesterday, we blacked out the default start page in Firefox and redirected visitors to the Mozilla sites to a special action page. We also sent direct mess
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Girls Need Math
The other day a programmer-friend sent an e-mail to me and three other women. It read:
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A group of Finnish math teachers write an open textbook in a weekend hackathon
A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event s...
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NSA Interception Infographic
Late Friday afternoon , the government asked the Supreme Court to dismiss our lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a 2008 law gives the government unprecedented authority to monitor Americans ’ international emails and phone calls.
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.
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How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
The Digital Imprimatur
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Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a …
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E-mail addresses as user IDs: stupid policy
Once again, Apple is facing a "hacking" fiasco that may have resulted from its own amateurish user-ID policy. It's not that Apple was hac...
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Qwest CEO: NSA Punished Qwest for Refusing to Participate in Illegal Surveillance--Pre-9/11!
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts (log-in required) worth hundreds of...
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Rent Control
New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in […]
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The Elephant in the Bath-House
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…
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Pump Up the Storage
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…