Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
Ten Predictions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Update, September 2015: I saw the HN thread about Dan Luu's review of this post, and felt people were a little too generous with the scoring. So I'll offer my own scores and justifications here. 1) XML databases will surpass relational databases in
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company's changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to...
Nothing on the internet lasts forever. But Disney’s 10-year mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight is its own story.
The climate emergency requires actions at emergency speed for a rapid transition to a post-carbon, safe-climate future.
The California Senate Appropriations committee failed to pass Sen. Susan Eggman’s (Stockton) Right to Repair bill, SB 983, Thursday, which would have significantly expanded Californians’ access to the parts, tools, and service information needed to fix consumer electronics and appliances.
This latest installment in Safeguard Defenders’ Investigations series takes a deep dive into the Chinese police’s expanding global policing toolkit by examining a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (accordin
Today the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality — a terrible step for the future of a free and open internet and for…
I know it's bad that the boat is stuck, but I like that the boat is stuck.
Don't try this at home.
I created a bot to respond to these types of emails…
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a 'covenant not...
This case involves Apple’s handling of user-uploaded files hosted in private iCloud storage. Instead of adopting PhotoDNA to scan hosted files for CSAM, Apple created its own proprietary alternative, NeuralHash, which apparently wasn’t as good. So Apple U-turned on its...
On the trend of consumer software designed around developer convenience instead of user needs, from forced accounts to telemetry to privilege creep.
Recently a Dutch hacker was able to take control of 4 million solar panel installations (FTM (Dutch), Euractiv, Victor Gevers). And this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened either (PV Magazine). As usual, huge thanks are due to the many beta readers and experts who helped improve this article with…
The Senate Judiciary Committee today by voice vote advanced the Open Courts Act (S. 2614), a bill that would modernize the federal judiciary’s case management system and — finally — make access to court filings free for all Americans.
Self-hosted and privacy-respecting blog software that puts the domain, data, and reader relationship back in your hands. Private alternatives to Medium, vetted since 2015.
Why is this economy so difficult to manage? The macro statistics are hiding the experience of being cheated.
Imagine, just for a moment, that the Government wanted to keep a record of everyone's sexuality. They need to know this detailed demographic data because it will be highly useful in civic planning. It will help them work out what provision needs to be made for sexual health services, how many children are likely to be…
The shameless spin around Stargate UAE
Romance fraud has been growing as an issue for years. It's not uncommon to see news stories with bewildered victims explaining just how deeply they'd been sucked in. After receiving a number of opener
I emailed my 22 year old cousin Eric, who’s graduating Summa in Economics from Harvard, to see if he needed any help getting interviews...
Earlier this year, we wrote an investigative blog post criticizing the BBB’s pay-to-play policies. Many of you (including the Today show) were interested in our research. A few months later, we received a nasty letter from the BBB threatening that they would freeze our accreditation if we didn’t tak
Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all…
