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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
I rely on Google Calendar to tell me where I am supposed to be, when and with whom. When the service collapsed for an afternoon last month, it felt like a teachable moment. For a few seconds, I pan…
The case of David Miranda got a lot of attention around the world after UK authorities were accused of abusing an anti-terrorism law to evade the normal constitutional restrains on police power and question someone because of their political associations. Well, a very similar abuse of power appears to have happened…
A popular old essay about finding calm and rhythm online.
Mark Twain:There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. If this is true of all science, it is doubly true o…
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
Encryption is privacy incarnate – don’t ban it
“A contract is only as good as the people who sign it,” was a saying often quoted by an elderly attorney I worked with for the first fifteen years of my practice and I always nodded in his general direction when he said that and smiled as if agreeing. I liked and respected him, he […]
Tech is entering a period of inequality where the big winners lift the sector as a whole even as smaller companies suffer. The best example is Facebook, Google, and digital advertising.
We raised over $1 million this year to directly support organizations on the front lines of the fight for online privacy and freedom.
The University of Oxford today started vaccinations of a novel HIV vaccine candidate as part of a Phase I clinical trial in the UK.
A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that should be addressed...
A team led by researchers at UW Tacoma, UW and Washington State University Puyallup has discovered a chemical that kills coho salmon in urban streams before the
After downloading all 1,265,114 Hacker News submissions from the official Hacker News API, I gathered a few interesting statistics which show the true impact of Hacker News.
Stack Overflow traffic during DEF CON shows what technologies are trending in the hacker community
EFF joined more than sixty civil liberties organizations and public interest groups from across the world yesterday in calling upon the world's governments to support the creation of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The special rapporteurs are independent experts...
Bad things lead to more bad things. But (some) bad things can be fixed.
Reflections and community quotes from a decade in the Bay Area dating landscape.
The debate surrounding the Codes of Conduct (CoC) adopted by Open Source projects may be reaching a turning point. In September 2025, a controversy erupted over the governance of RubyGems, a corner…
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce…
Now that there’s decent chance of US investment in rail, Randal O’Toole is resurrecting his takes from the early Obama era, warning that high-speed rail is a multi-trillion dollar money…
“The dreamers look skyward with longing. The Internet hums with its usual promise — you will find your people, your myth, your wonder, and maybe your transformation.”
I've been an Apple user for over a decade and generally very happy with that life choice, but since iOS / iPadOS 26 and MacOS Tahoe were released a few month...
