5911
What happens when the CCP decides that you need to die
The manner in which a state kills people has major implications for that state's structure
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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The IBM-ification of Google?
I used to think Google owning the full vertical stack was a masterstroke. Like TSMC silicon, TPUs, their own data centers, proprietary models, search engine....
5914
How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain
Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain"…
5915
Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID
Big Brother Watch and other human rights, civil liberties, digital rights, and racial justice organisations have written to the Prime Minister urging him to abandon plans for a mandatory digital ID. The letter comes just days before an expected statement from Keir Starmer announcing the rollout of a mandatory digital…
5916
US Army applying new areas of math
Many times on this blog I've argued that the difference between pure and applied math is motivation. As my graduate advisor used to say, “Applied mathematics is not a subject classification. It's an attitude.” Traditionally there was general agreement regarding what is pure math and what is applied. Number theory and…
5917
Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus
In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: Copied JSON to 📋⧉ JSON"hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun"…
5918
Texas woman wins round in lawsuit challenging swat teams destruction of her home
ARLINGTON, Va.—On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by a Texas woman whose home was destroyed by a SWAT team may move […]
5919
What makes the perfect office?
In 1923, the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design some homes for workers in his factory near Bordeaux. Le Corbusier duly delivered brigh…
5920
WP20 and Audrey Scholars
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined…
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An invitation to a secret society
Or: why you should be a lizard
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Jacob Appelbaum Leaves the Tor Project
Transitions: Long time digital advocate, security researcher, and developer Jacob Appelbaum...
5925
Coursera and Udemy are now one company
Today, I’m excited to share that we have completed the Coursera-Udemy combination, bringing together two mission-driven companies to create one of the world’s most comprehensive skills development platforms.
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Data Science of the Facebook World
Stephen Wolfram shares interesting Facebook data analysis finds from the Data Donor program of Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook.
5928
Assange Hearing Day 14
Monday was a frustrating day as the Assange Hearing drifted deep into a fantasy land where nobody knows or is allowed to say that people were tortured in Guantanamo Bay and under extraordinary rendition. The willingness of Judge Baraitser to accept American red lines on what witnesses can and cannot say has combined…
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EFF Politely Asks PTO to Stop Issuing So Many Crappy Software Patents
Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued countless bad software patents. These patents tend to be hopelessly vague and overbroad. Indeed, they are often so packed with indecipherable patent jargon that software engineers have trouble understanding them. As one programmer...
5931
The Irony of iPad: A Great Day For Open Technologies
With the announcement of the iPad, the usual suspects have come out decrying a closed, proprietary, fully locked down system. For instance, a story on the top of Hacker News today [http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/27/how-a-great-product-can-be-bad-news-apple-ipad-and-the-closed-
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My Life Offline
Everyone wants to know how my month offline was. They ask it casually, like “How’s work going?” or “What’d you do this weekend?” But it’s not a casual question. It was a huge, incredible, transformative experience. Those 30 days felt like six months. My habits changed, my relationships changed, my identity changed, my…
5934
Transform any text into a patent application
[Hello everyone! Thanks for taking a look at my blog! If you want updates on this project or other things I’m working on, just follow me on twitter ]
5935
An Archive of a Different Type
It was supposed to be magazines.Elaine Wooton contacted me as many people do - in the middle of a shutdown and discard project, asking if the Internet Archive might want some of what is destined for deep storage or the trash compactor. In this case, she said, there might be some old journals and magazines
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Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?
In which I attempt to be pragmatic. Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? This is a question where freedom, practicality, and reality all collide into a mess. Google has recently announced that Android users will only be able to install apps which have been digitally signed…
5938
Selfish reasons to want more humans
A bigger world is better for everyone
5939
Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0
Trombone emoji skanking it's way into our hearts …
5940
Meta Meets Microsoft
Meta’s new hardware is more impressive than expected, and the Microsoft partnership makes a lot of sense. The question is if Meta will capture enough value to outweigh their costs.