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Why do so few people major in computer science?
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 663 posts.
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What programming languages are used late at night?
Do you program in the evening? How about late at night? I enjoy programming as a hobby and I'm a bit of a night owl, so I often code well outside working hours, sometimes past midnight. And whatever time it is, when I run into a bug I visit Stack Overflow. This means that Stack Overflow data can give us insights into…
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Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak
UpGuard has discovered an open database containing information on what appear to be approximately 198 million American voters left misconfigured by a GOP analytics firm.
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Arturo Di Modica has a point
I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago. Folks have been talking about the Fearless Girl statue ever since it was dropped in Manhattan’s Financial District some five weeks ago. …
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No politics please, we're hackers, too busy to improve the world
If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics. This is evidenced in many ways including ‘safe spaces’ and moratoria on discussing anything political because it has no bearing on the more interesting bits of…
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A comment left on Slashdot
The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth. I don̵…
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RIP the Broccoli Tree
For the past few years, Patrik Svedberg has been taking photos of a beautiful Swedish tree he dubbed The Broccoli Tree. In a short time, the tree gained a healt
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We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
12 Mar, 2017 The Web we have is not broken for Google and Facebook. People farmers are reaping the rewards of their violations into our lives to the tune of tens of billions in revenue every year. How can they possibly be our allies?
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Given Choice, Patients Will Choose Cannabis Over Prescribed Opioids
Chronic pain sufferers and those taking mental health meds would rather turn to cannabis instead of their prescribed opioid medication, according to new research by the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria.
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We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
According to reports published Tuesday evening by Politico, a group of surveillance hawks in the House of Representatives is trying to ram through a bill that would extend mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. We expect a vote to happen on the House floor as early as tomorrow, which...
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I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream
There is much I take for granted in my life, and the normal functioning of American government is one of those things. In my 46 years, I’ve lived under nine different presidents. The first I remember is Carter. I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1992, but I
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Why Infrastructure Is So Expensive
If we can align the incentives of the players involved, we can build infrastructure that is actually necessary and while doing it quicker and at lower prices than we do now.
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As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
Tomorrow, two high-speed rail lines open in France, providing new corridors for trains to slice through the countryside at 200 mph (320 km/h). One is a 302-kilometer link that will connect Paris to…
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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way,
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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
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DRM Is Toxic to Culture
In pursuit of market control now, deployers of DRM are robbing us of our culture in perpetuity by enclosing the future commons. It’s possible that you think that unauthorised use of copyright…
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You Will Not Understand This
This is my exit interview from social media. Some of these “services” I abandoned years ago. Others I am still struggling to avoid. From experience, I assume that you, reader, will make it impossible for me to remain ignorant of developments WRT: all of this garbage. What all of this garbage has in common is that it…
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Why we never thank open source maintainers
Why we never thank open source maintainers - Unicooo
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FCC Filings Overwhelmingly Support Net Neutrality Once Spam Is Removed
An Explosion of Comments
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Lessons from last week’s cyberattack
Early Friday morning the world experienced the year’s latest cyberattack. Starting first in the United Kingdom and Spain, the malicious “WannaCrypt” software quickly spread globally, blocking customers from their data unless they paid a ransom using Bitcoin. The WannaCrypt exploits used in the attack were drawn from…
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Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web
Why hasn’t Apple added support for service workers in Safari for iOS? Could it be because it goes against their app store revenue model?