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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 658 posts.
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One of the FBI’s Major Claims in the iPhone Case Is Fraudulent
“We have enormous computing power in the US government, but we need to be able to bring it to bear without the phone killing itself.” – FBI Director James Comey, March 1 , 2016.
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Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn't What It Used to Be
Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of...
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HN comments are underrated
HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously…
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
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Save Firefox
Once upon a time, there were two major browsers that virtually everyone used: Netscape and Internet Explorer, locked in a death-battle for the future of the Web. They went to enormous lengths to tempt Web publishers to optimize their sites to work best inside their windows, and hoped that users...
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People Call Me Aaron
Today is January 11th. Some of you know what this day means to me — it marks the 3 year anniversary of when I was in New York and got a…
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Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
The governments of Australia, Germany, the UK and the US are destroying your privacy. Some people don't see the problem...
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Too many people have peed in the pool
Oh goodness, what fun twitter was in the early days, a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest. It was glorious ‘to turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping.’ We frolicked and water-bombed and sometimes, in the moonlight, skinny-dipped.
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Who Will Command the Robot Armies?
This is the text version of a talk I gave on November 11, 2016, at the Direction conference in Sydney.
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Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook
I have never had a Facebook account, or an Instagram account. There is a Facebook account called "Richard Stallman", but it is an impostor.
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We Need a Better PC
My challenge: I'm trying to get a computer that doesn't suck Like lots of people I spend about half of my waking life on my laptop, so this really matters. However, I don't want a Mac. Apple...
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Artem vs. Predator
I'm not sure what it was. Might have been the Predator movies, might have been something else. Heat vision. The ability to see heat was something I wanted for…
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Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley
Why “few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor”
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Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon
This is extremely long and probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon, so I’m putting it here for anyone.
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Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it less secure
Recently, account takeovers, email hacking, and targeted phishing attacks have been all over the news. Hacks of various politicians, allegedly carried out by Russian hackers, have yielded troves of data. Despite the supposed involvement of state-sponsored agents, some hacks were not reliant on complex zero-day…
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Facebook is the new Excel
If you’re building a SaaS startup, then your biggest competitor isn’t a competitor. It’s Microsoft Excel. That was the mantra a few years ago. Add in Google Docs and it still holds true. Contact lists, mailing lists, accounts, invoicing, mark...
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Deep-Fried Data
This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 27, 2016, at the Collections as Data event at the Library of Congress. [ video ] (21 mins)
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Reasons not to use Uber
Uber donated a million dollars to the corrupter's inaugural celebration. This is the moral equivalent of a bribe.
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Bulgaria Passes a Law Requiring Open Source
Less than two years after my presentation titled “Open source for the government”, and almost exactly one year after I became advisor to…