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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 515 posts.
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Comments on the Sony Hack
I don’t have a lot to say about the Sony hack, which seems to still be ongoing. I want to highlight a few points, though. At this point, the attacks seem to be a few hackers and not the North Korean government. (My guess is that it’s not an insider, either.) That we live in the world where we aren’t sure if any given…
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How Paul Graham Is Wrong
I love Paul Graham’s essays and his latest is no exception: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In. I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m…
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Machines are better referees than humans but we’ll be sued if we use them
Andy Howlett and Mark Williamson in our group have been developing fantastic software. It can read the whole scientific literature and analyse it in minute detail. One of the things we are starting with is chemistry. ChemVisitor (part of AMI2) can read chemical structure diagrams and chemical names and work out what…
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Wayback Machine Hits 400,000,000,000
The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web, has reached a landmark with 400 billion webpages indexed. This makes it possible to surf the web as it looked anytime from late 1996 up until a few hours ago. Let’s take a trip back in time and visit some sites. Yahoo (Captured way back
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Let's Build a Traditional City and Make a Profit
Let's transform an old airport site into a Traditional City.
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The Wire in HD
This tale begins and ends with a fellow named Bob Colesberry, who taught me as much as he could about filmmaking in the three or four years I was privileged to work with him. To those who knew Bob, it will provoke warm memories to say that he was not a language guy; he understood image, and story, and the delicate way…
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EFF Asks Judge to Rule NSA Internet Backbone Spying Techniques Unconstitutional
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today presented a federal court with a detailed explanation of how the NSA taps into the Internet backbone and requested the judge rule that the agency is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching the collected data. EFF argues...
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The World Health Organization calls for the decriminalisation of drug use
Transform Drug Policy Foundation is an independent charity working towards a safer system of legal regulation for all drugs. When we legalise and regulate drugs that are currently illegal we can take the power away from organised crime and establish safety controls.
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Tor exit node operator prosecuted in Austria
June 30th, 2014 marks a turning point for Austria. Not only was the Vorratsdatenspeicherung (data retention) terminated preliminarily for good (no, really), the operation of TOR exit nodes supposedly was also declared a criminal offense by a regional criminal court. The accused was operating a TOR exit node which was…
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Cat Litter Boxes and DRM
I bought a litter box and involuntarily signed up to a never ending subscription service.
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The Government is Silencing Twitter and Yahoo, and It Won't Tell Us Why
The government is using shaky legal arguments to silence major Internet companies without giving them – or the public – the opportunity to respond. In three separate recent cases, the government has sent a grand jury subpoena to Yahoo or Twitter and requested a gag order from a magistrate judge, attempting to bar…
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Yes, The CIA Spied On Congress
Why? The torture report, of course: Late last night, McClatchy reported that the CIA inspector general has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the CIA illegally monitored C…
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We are throttling the FCC to dialup modem speeds until they pay us for bandwidth
Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site.
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IE7 users, we need to talk…
In 2014 we dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 — and offered to buy a new computer for any customer stuck on it. The offer has long since closed.
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Abstract software patents struck down by Supreme Court
In a long-awaited decision, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank today, striking down an abstract software patent. Essentially, the Court ruled that adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea does not make it patentable. Many thousands of software patents—particularly the...
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India’s Downward Spiral
How India is losing its footing on free expression. The world’s biggest democracy is a formidable power in the IT sector. With software exports comprising approximately ten percent of India’s total GDP and a technology sector that employs more than 2.5 million people, India is poised to become a...
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How the NSA Threatens National Security
Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programs continue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassified additional information, and the President’s Review Group has just released its report and recommendations. With all this going on, it’s easy to become…
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Independence Day
The latest news and stories about how technology is helping people around the world solve problems, innovate and do more each day.
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State Laws That Stop Cities From Installing Fast Internet
For decades, municipal broadband operations have been subject to a minefield of restrictions and barriers designed to make the prospect of establishing or maintaining a community broadband network costly, difficult, and unsustainable. The Biden administration initially pledged that the Broadband Equity, Access, and…
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Sana'a
The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable sandbox in the interior were they didn't even bother to put in borders until fifteen years ago. That just…
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Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)
The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the…
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I Still Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem
One of the most popular blog posts I have written is called "I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem". In it, I rant against service providers trying to lock their customers into a monoculture. Companies are always looking for the edge which will make them stand out - they think that restricting what their…
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Mitch Hedberg and GIS
Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. Last night after the kids were asleep, I sat down with a beer (Sierra Nevada) and figured out how I could get the data and perform the calculation.
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