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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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Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
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The Pendulum Swings, Again
In the early days of computing, computers were physical monsters, occupying large rooms or even whole buildings. Acess to them was closely guarded, you were lucky if you had access at all, let alone close-up and personal access. That was reserved for the system operators, the people tasked with the relatively boring…
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Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)
I believe that Silicon Valley is like Las Vegas, except they make you pass a number of tests before they let you gamble. This means that only a relatively select group gets to sit at the table. The purpose of this post is to analyze the folowing problem:
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California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation
It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem…
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White House Deletes TSA Petition
At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House
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Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
Warning: According to Facebook you are not allowed to read this post, so beware.
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Iranian Web Programmer’s Death Sentence to Be Carried Out Any Moment
URGENT: Saeed Malekpour’s Death Sentence to Be Carried Out Any Moment.Wall PhotosURGENT: Saeed Malekpour’s Death Sentence to Be Carried Out Any Moment. When Saeed Malekpour’s lawy…
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I Just Gave Up $4000 Per Month to Keep My Freedom of Speech
Wow. Four thousand dollars a month. It was Automatic Money, rolling in like crazy with no effort on my part, absolutely no overhead, and it was remarkably reliable. Almost $1000 every week, $130 ev…
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Maddox on Link-Baiting Aggregation Sites
11 Sexy Girls with Star Wars tattoos you don't have the rights to publish
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Dutch parliament rejects ACTA, prohibits government to sign or ratify.
On 29 May 2012, a majority of the Dutch parliament voted for three resolutions in the fight against ACTA. In short, the parliament requested the Dutch government to make the final decision to not sign or ratify ACTA (resolutions 1 and 2 below) and not to sign any new treaties similar to ACTA and to
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Charles Carreon Drops Bogus Lawsuit Against The Oatmeal Creator
San Francisco - Attorney Charles Carreon dropped his bizarre lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman today, ending his strange legal campaign against Inman's humorous and creative public criticism of a frivolous cease and desist letter that Carreon wrote on behalf of his client Funny Junk...
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Dutch Judge Who Ordered Pirate Bay Links Censored Has Conflict of Interest
Judge Chris Hensen, who ordered the Dutch Pirate Party to censor all links to The Pirate Bay recently (something Techdirt calls Censorship Crazy), appears...
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Trust is Fragile
Taylor’s post about our growth in 2011 included a bunch of numbers showing how the pistons inside the 37signals engine are pounding faster, but it all got swept away by what seemed like an innocent side-note: The 100 millionth file was called cat.jpg. Being as it is that the internet is co…
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EFF Patent Project Gets Half-Million-Dollar Boost from Mark Cuban and 'Notch'
San Francisco - America's broken patent system needs major reform to protect innovators and the public. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is announcing a major new boost to its patent work: a half-million dollars in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban and game developer Markus "Notch...
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Now That's What I Call Social Proof
Watch streaming video, find interesting podcasts, and discover classic music and new songs from independent artists.
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The War On RSS
John Gruber was right, when pointing to Dan Frakes’ review of the Mail app in Mountain Lion, to highlight the fact that the application drops support for RSS (he calls it an “interesting omission”, which is both correct and understated). It is indeed the most interesting aspect of the review, even though it’s buried…