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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 515 posts.
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Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)
I'm 99.99% sure that my writing this letter will have no effect, but my conscience tells me to write it anyway. Danziger's cartoon has pushed me out of my lethargy.
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Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court to Rule APIs Can’t Be Copyrighted
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a brief with the Supreme Court of the United States today, arguing on behalf of 77 computer scientists that the justices should review a disastrous appellate court decision finding that application programming interfaces (APIs) are...
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Scribd and Quora considered harmful
There are two terrible web properties out there that everyone hates, Scribd and Quora. Please don’t use them. Instead of Scribd just host a PDF anywhere, or upload text to pastebin or make a nice blog on WordPress or Medium or something. And instead of Quora use Ask MetaFilter or StackExchange .
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Net neutrality
When there is a structural reason consumers don’t have freedom of choice, and the free market can’t work, consumers need minimal protection from the government so that they don’t get abused. We...
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NBC Story about Hacking at Sochi is 100% Fraudulent
Yesterday (Feb 5 2014) On February 4th, NBC News ran a story claiming that if you bring your mobile phone or laptop to the Sochi Olympics...
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China collecting Apple iCloud data
Fighting censorship with technology since 2011. We use AI to monitor censorship and expand free speech worldwide.
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2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor
Annual letters from the Gates Foundation.
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Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
This is a really strange blog post to have to write, simply because the situation is absurd. It would be comedic, really, if the situation was not costing me money and resulted in one of my best-se…
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The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
I was pleasantly surprised when somebody shared my traveling salesman animation to reddit and the post made it all the way to reddit’s default front page (i.e. the top 25). The gif racked up over 1.3 …
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Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism
Web platform engineer. 15+ years building for Twitch, Urbit, PayIt, and more. Kansas City.
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Chaos Computer Club files criminal complaint against the German Government
On Monday, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and the International League for Human Rights (ILMR), have filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor General's office. The complaint is...
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Software in 2014
We’re at an inflection point in the practice of constructing software. Our tools are good, our server developers are happy, but when it comes to building client-side software, we really don’t know where we’re going or how to get there.
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Introducing EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month
Here at EFF, we see a lot of stupid patents. There was the patent on “scan to email.” And the patent on “bilateral and multilateral decision making.” There are so many stupid patents that Mark Cuban endowed a chair at EFF dedicated to eliminating them. We wish we could catalog them all, but with...
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The Book of Graham
I emailed my 22 year old cousin Eric, who’s graduating Summa in Economics from Harvard, to see if he needed any help getting interviews...
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The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
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Eigenmorality
This post is about an idea I had around 1997, when I was 16 years old and a freshman computer-science major at Cornell. Back then, I was extremely impressed by a research project called CLEVER, wh…
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US Sought Permission to Change Historical Record of a Public Court Proceeding
A few weeks ago we fought a battle for transparency in our flagship NSA spying case, Jewel v. NSA. But, ironically, we weren't able to tell you anything about it until now. On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on...
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Russia Blocks Access to Major Independent News Sites
Russia's government has escalated its use of its Internet censorship law to target news sites, bloggers, and politicians under the slimmest excuse of preventing unauthorized protests and enforcing house arrest regulations. Today, the country's ISPs have received orders to block a list of major news...
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