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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,067 posts.
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Yet Another "People Plug in Strange USB Sticks" Story
I’m really getting tired of stories like this: Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers. And if the drive or CD had an official logo on it, 90% were installed. Of course…
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How LinkedIn Just Made Ten Million People Feel Special
I’m rarely impressed by email spam, but LinkedIn is doing something brilliant right now. Check it out!
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DAG Rosenstein’s “Responsible Encryption” Demand Is Bad
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein delivered a speech on Tuesday about what he calls “responsible encryption” today. It misses the mark, by far. Rosenstein starts with a fallacy, attempting to convince you that encryption is unprecedented: Our society has never had a system where evidence of...
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Programmer Migration Patterns
I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how programmers seem to move from one to another. There's a more common...
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Security for the people
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
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High school programming taught in Haskell in Argentina
Today I want to share a wonderful experience. I'm professor of introductory programming in two years at Florentino Ameghino School and one...
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ACLU: ICE and CBP Are Secretly Tracking Us Using Stingrays. We’re Suing
The public has a right to know if and how often ICE and CBP are using Stingrays.
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Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub
Radical, as I like to remind folks, means to get to the root of an issue (same derivation as radish). So when I say I am offering some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub and the controversy it has generated, I mean that I hope to use the discussion to ask some very basic, “at the roots,” … Continue reading Some radical…
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This Thing for Which We Have No Name (2014)
It's not my job to be a behavioral economist; my job is to actually popularize behavioral economics. The interesting thing to me—as someone who has a brother who's an academic—is that academics, however brilliant, are the worst marketers in the world. And there's a reason for this, which is they, of course, possibly…
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Mars will have a lot of wicker furniture
So we've landed on Mars, now we need somewhere to sit. It's pretty expensive to ship furniture from earth, so time to start building some chairs.
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Russia Has ‘Oligarchs,’ the US Has ‘Businessmen’
Our elites are engaged in normal economic activity or else looking out for the betterment of humanity, while theirs are nefariously dominating politics.
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ComputerCOP: Dubious 'Internet Safety Software' Police Distributed to Families
[caption]ComputerCOP in Maricopa County, Arizona[/caption] For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online. Police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys have handed out...
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PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts
Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@ging...
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How Can You Help the Internet Archive?
With the Internet Archive being mentioned prominently in the news for the past couple of weeks, we've had thousands of people discuss us in social media, and contact us directly with strong concerns and worries. Above all, many want, in some way, to "help" and have asked us what they can do, if anything.While your
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Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
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Which topics get the upvote on Hacker News?
Hacker News is a popular social news website, mostly covering technology and startup topics. It relies on user submissions and moderation, where each submitted story can be upvoted and commented by users, which in term determines whether the story reaches the front page and how long it stays there.
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Internet Community Shut Out of Stop Online Piracy Act Hearing - Again
This morning, EFF’s staff and concerned netizens across the country tuned into the live webcast of the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261). At least we tried to. Unfortunately, we were confronted with an incredibly poor webcast stream for much of the...
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Strava raises prices but can’t tell you how much it costs anymore
Some days, I just can’t decide if Strava tries hard to hurt their reputation, or, if it just comes naturally. Today, however, I’m left flabbergasted.
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An open letter to the W3C Director, CEO, team and membership
Dear Jeff, Tim, and colleagues, In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem. By doing so, the organization offered...