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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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Somali Law
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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Taking on a Patent Troll: Caveat Troglodytarum
This is the definitive guide to video encoding. Learn everything you need to know about encoding, transcoding, compression & video codecs all in one place.
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Latest TPP Leak Shows US Still Pushing Terrible DRM and Copyright Term Proposals
Today Wikileaks published a new draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s intellectual property chapter. This draft text, from May 2014, gives us another look into the current state of negotiations over this plurilateral trade agreement’s copyright provisions since another draft was leaked...
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Closed access means people die
Jenny Molloy and I have been representing the Open Knowledge Foundation at the Open Science Summit and we presented the Open Research Reports (ORR) project. The slides we used are at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/orr.pptx . I expect that at some stage we’ll be on the video record (last year’s was very useful and…
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Singing bus horns in West Sumatra
Sound: Kalason oto (often simply “ kalason ”) Location : Alahan Panjang, Kab. Solok, West Sumatra This post is dedicated to Pak Budahar - a real Minang musical legend who literally spread music across Sumatra, providing sweet solace to his passengers for decades. Next time you honk your horn,
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Yellowstone National Park’s Sound and Video Libraries
Yellowstone National Park maintains a collection of sounds and videos taken in the park that are in the public domain and free for anyone to use. The collection
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Police Must Respect the Right of Citizens to Record Them
“I’m asking all the citizens of North Charleston to continue taping.” That is what Councilwoman Dorothy Williams said in response to the shooting death of Walter Scott. She and others recognize that the story would have been very different without the video showing that a white police officer shot...
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On the Exponential View
The following is the text of a talk I gave in San Francisco on December 1st, 2016.
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Ursula K. Le Guin on “Spare Time”
In praise of the mundane, unquantifiable, impractical activities that feed creative work and fill life with meaning.
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Tell President Obama to support the Federal Research Public Access Act
If you’re tired of blog posts about open science, sorry dude—but it feels great to be part a group of blogging nerds who, for once, are actually having a nonzero (and positive, I think!…
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Why a land-value tax is inevitable
A decade after the late 2000s recession, much of the world is now back at the top of the economic cycle, and critically near the next…
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America’s Transit Exceptionalism
The rest of the world is building subways like crazy. The U.S. has pretty much given up.
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Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools
And yet it does. Are we ready to deal?
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Finality does not exist in payments
Many people believe some transactions are final. The reality is a bit more complicated, and involves technical, social, and legal factors.
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Parler Tricks: Making Software Disappear
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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University of Oregon will monitor students' social media statements
We have been discussing the expanding monitoring and sanctioning of teachers for their political commentary on social media. We have also discussed such actions taken against college, high school …
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Apple's Texas-Sized Problem
Link to: https://popular.info/p/apples-texas-problem
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Where are the economies of scale in homebuilding?
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
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Legal Weed is Hurting San Francisco's Hippies
Legalized weed is putting California's drug dealers out of business, as well as its hippies.
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Why did clothing become boring?
An investigation into when, how, and why everyone started dressing the same — and what it was like when they didn't
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The decline and fall of the hit instrumental song
Nowadays vocalists control popular music—but that wasn't always true
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OpenAI and journalism
We support journalism, partner with news organizations, and believe The New York Times lawsuit is without merit.