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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 597 posts.
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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)
BitTorrent used to dominate not just piracy, but the internet. Now, it’s barely noticed in traffic studies. What happened to the platform?
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Why ActivityPub is the future
We often tout things like “Mastodon is based on open web protocols” as one of its advantages. I want to elaborate why exactly that’s a good thing.
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Bitcoin is a Cult
The Bitcoin community has changed greatly over the years; from technophiles that could explain a Merkle tree in their sleep, to speculators driven by the desire for a quick profit & blockchain startups seeking billion dollar valuations led by people who don’t even know what a Merkle tree is. As the years have gone on…
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How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
Multinational organisations are collaborating in the open on OpenStreetMap
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How Does Mastodon Work?
I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.
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YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form
On YouTube, there’s a long tail of content that pretty much guarantees the inclusion of every potential human interest. There are skate videos, makeup tutorials, and backyard surgical removals of blackheads. And yet the presentation of a lot of this content — especially when it’s trying to attract a large audience …
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GDPR – A Practical Guide for Developers (2017)
You’ve probably heard about GDPR. The new European data protection regulation that applies practically to everyone. Especially if you are working in a big company, it’s most likely that there’sContinue reading
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Bill and Melinda Gates Are Paying Off Nigeria's $76M Debt to Japan
Bill and Melinda Gates have announced they will settle Nigeria’s $76 million debt to Japan.
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Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your goin…
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Brendan Eich Writes to the US Senate: We Need a GDPR for the United States
Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave, has written to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, to present the case for GDPR-like data protection standards in the United States.
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Mark Felt-Tipped: Uncovering top-secret information by counting pixels
KEMUDITOTO merupakan official Situs Togel 4D & Toto TOGEL ONLINE Terjamin Maxwin dengan akses cepat, pilihan permainan lengkap, layanan responsif, dan nyaman digunakan setiap hari.
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New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ electronic devices
US Customs and Border Protection, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, today posted a revised policy on Border Searches of Electronic Devices and a Privacy Impact Assessment of some of the changes made by the new policy.
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Illegal Production and Use of Banned CFC-11 in China's Foam Blowing Industry
We investigate and campaign against environmental crime and abuse
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Politics is bad because we use an 18th century voting system
While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics.
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Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click
Does Google show you different search results based on your personal info, even when signed out and in so-called "incognito" mode? We ran a study to find out.
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Community-Owned Fiber Networks: Value Leaders in America
Our examination of advertised prices shows that community-owned fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks in the United States generally charge less for entry-level broadband service than do competing private providers, and don’t use initial low “teaser” rates that sharply rise months later.
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A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no…
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The Price of Free Is Actually Too High
I loved this quote by Tristan Harris in the New York Magazine article The Internet Apologizes … “We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too
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Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
The modern technical interview is a rite of passage for software engineers and (hopefully!) the precursor to a great job.
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Blind since birth, writing code at Amazon since 2013
Michael Forzano said he has a good “mental map of the structure of the code,” which allows him to help colleagues and provide unique feedback to his team.
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Why We Disagree with The New York Times
In the early days of mobile, we built a set of APIs that enabled other companies to recreate the Facebook experience. This is very different from the public APIs used by third-party developers.
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The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late?
If you, like me, frequently commute via public transit, you may be familiar with the following situation:
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An OCR cliche: Into his/her anus (2009)
In order to improve the quality of my transcription of the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I collate the text against the Google Books version. Although the OCR is faulty, it is helpful fo…