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The US digital service
A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. The U.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying the way startups build products to...
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
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Fuck the Cloud (2009)
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
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Energy
I think a lot about how important cheap, safe, and abundant energy is to our future. A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of...
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Coding is not the new literacy
Despite the good intentions behind the movement to get people to code, both the basic premise and approach are flawed. The movement sits on the idea that “coding is the new literacy,” but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is.
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Why we will not be registering easydns.sucks
Similar to how it's getting harder these days to differentiate actual news from The Onion satires, reality takes on a somewhat surreal timbre when it starts to imitate your April Fool's gags from yesteryear… In 2011 we joked "easyDNS To Launch .SUX TLD", in which we posited a thinly veiled…
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We're heading for AOL 2.0
Before ‘HTTP’, whenever a new kind of application was invented (say ‘file sharing’, or ‘address book’ or ‘messaging’) someone would sit down with a bunch of others and would discuss this problem at some length. Then they’d draft up a document describing the problem they intended to solve and the protocol layer they…
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Saving 25,000 Manuals
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
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No Brainer
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
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Volkswagen and the Blame the Engineer Game
Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble. The dieselgate scandal just doesn’t seem to go away and even though the company is now under new management it seems that things are getting worse and worse as time goes by. What I really don’t get is this: Does Volkswagen actually believe the nonsense that they put out in order…
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Sex, Circuits and Deep House
Cari with the Institute Blinky Badge at Burning Man 2015. Photo credit: Nagutron.
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This Industry is Fucked
My least favorite topic in the world is 'Women in Tech', so I am going to make this short but I think it's something that needs to be said.
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Autonomous Weapons: An Open Letter from AI and Robotics Researchers
2016 (>30k signatures) open letter for AI and Robotics researchers calling for ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.
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ICANN's assault on personal and small business privacy
This post is extremely long and detailed and is on quite a dense subject. Here is the short version.
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Django Awarded MOSS Grant from Mozilla
Posted by Andrew Godwin on Dec. 11, 2015
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Trackers and bank accounts
A Finnish online bank leaked out user data by using a third-party tracker script.
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Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely
We already put legal limits on financial, medical, military, transportation, and agriculture technology. Why not online tracking?
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TSA Master Keys
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors…
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More than 39M Americans Only Have Access to One Wired Broadband Provider
Since 2010 the US government has spent $3.3B on broadband infrastructure yet 39 Million Americans only have access to 1 wired broadband provider. See the worst states and learn more about your state.
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China
The most important story of 2014 that most people ignored was the Chinese economy overtaking the US economy. (This is using the purchasing power parity metric, which incorporates differences in...
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Google, Our Patron Saint of the Closed Web
Lately there’s been a barrage of articles about how Apple is destroying the open web (because “app store, lol”) and it is Time Something Was Done About This: Apple’s paranoid appr…
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Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US
On Apr 14 2015, the Virginia State Board of Elections immediately decertified use of the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. This seems pretty minor, but it received a tremendous amount of pushback from some local election officials. In this post, I’ll explain how we got to that…
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Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need
You know those things that, once you learn about them for the first time, you start seeing them absolutely everywhere? Recently, that’s been my experience with problem-solution ordering issues. They keep cropping up: not just in the context of gam...