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Why software patents are not fixable
I’m not a patent lawyer. I’m not even a lawyer. I’m just a software developer, and like every software developer, I’ve probably unknowingly infringed upon hundreds of patents while routinely doing my job.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
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Should you submit to Hacker News?
Analysis of article posting behavior to the Hacker News forum, including the best time to post to Hacker News.
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War Crimes Seem to Be Official US Policy Now
We Will Rue The Day
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The U.S. Census Bureau and "Super Intelligence"
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in …
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Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries
For over a century, fixed prices have made markets more transparent. Surveillance pricing threatens to reverse that progress by allowing corporations to secretly tailor prices using personal data.
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Weird things you can buy online
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from your normal stuff.1 For example, last year I talked about owning a microscope. This year I debated doing another hobby but settled on a much dumber topic. Have you ever seen those lists of weird…
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To forget is an ethical act
On and off for the last several years I’ve been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on a
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“Information asymmetry” cuts both ways
– A Soviet-era political joke according to Wikipedia , though I've only seen it in an English text describing the C++ object model
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The NSA is not made of magic (2014)
I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously…
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“No-fly” trial: Closing arguments
Judge William Alsup convened day five of the trial in Ibrahim v. DHS — the first lawsuit challenging a U.S. government “no-fly” order to make it to trial — on Friday morning with the announcement that, “I received this additional material about the [plaintiff’s] daughter and her attempts to come here.”
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The People Deliberately Killing Facebook
Enjoy this post? Why not try the podcast version? Please download it, and also all the other episodes. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now
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Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU
Dear Mark Zuckerberg, Voting has already begun in one of the most consequential elections in U.S. history. More than ever before in American politics, t…
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EFF Asks Court to Undo Damage Done to First Amendment in Flawed NSL Ruling
EFF has petitioned a federal appeals court to reconsider its flawed ruling in our national security letter case on behalf of CREDO Mobile and Cloudflare. In July, the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco upheld the NSL statute against our First Amendment challenge. The court ruled that the FBI is...
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The art and history of lettering comics
Todd Klein's online book exploring little-known aspects of comics: lettering, letterers, logo design and more.
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Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making
Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making. From a game of points, assists, and rebounds, it has progressed into using thousands of data points to optimize every element of the game.
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The EU's new Cyber Resilience Act is about to tell us how to code
First a round of thanks for the many people in industry and government who provided valuable links, background and insights! I could not have done this without your help! If you spot any mistakes, or have suggestions, please do contact me on bert@hubertnet.nl The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal…
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$10,000 Raised for PyLadies at PyCon 2013
In a first-ever event, the PyCon organizers hosted a charity auction with the proceeds benefitting PyLadies , a mentorship group to help bri...
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