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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 515 posts.
In Mindstorms I made the claim that children can learn to program and that learning to program can affect the way they learn everything else. I had in mind something like the process of re-empowerment of probability: the ability to program would allow a student to learn and use powerful forms of proba- bilistic ideas…
This is perhaps one of the most striking passages I have read for a while. It describes the modern world with startling accuracy. In our fear of an increasingly authoritarian rule, we have allowed …
I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago in which I said macroeconomic collapse “may happen” and a few friends asked me why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s the likely outcome—I think we’ll find a way...
Richard Feynman's FBI file contains one very pointed, personal, anonymous attack. But can we figure out who wrote it from the context?
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Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation. The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s...
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
I love the idea of microlending, small loans of a few hundred dollars made to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas so that they can start or...
The Mexican website 1dmx.org (mirror here), was set up in the wake of a set of controversial December 1st 2012 protests against the inauguration of the new President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto. For a year, the site served as a source of information, news, discussion and commentary from the point...
Feedly reports that it is suffering from a denial-of-service attack that could impact users’ ability to catch up with the latest updates from their favourite websites.
Over two years ago I introduced an API authentication method so people could authorize outside third-party websites to add things to their Pinboard account without sharing their Pinboard password.
We’ve filed our reply brief in the appeal of Smith v. Obama, our case challenging the NSA’s mass telephone records collection on behalf of Idaho nurse Anna Smith. The case will be argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on December 8, 2014 in Seattle, and the public is welcome to attend....
To the eternal whine of the superannuated free-range SF geek ("dude, where's my jet pack? Where's my holiday on the moon? Where are my food pills? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century!") can be added an appendix: "and what about those L5 orbital space colonies the size of Manhattan?"
Commenting on this thread is closed. If you still feel that you have something important to contribute, post your comment in this spillover thread: SPILLOVER THREAD. I don’t want to hire any more w…
In 1992, a woman sued McDonald's because her coffee was too hot. It's considered a prime example of a greedy lawsuit. But the truth is much more complicated.
Is a product's technical complexity correlated to its revenue potential?
The society (closed access) journal ‘Copeia’ also has these spider trap links in it’s HTML, e.g. on this contents page: http://www.asihcopeiaonline.org/toc/cope/2013/4
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Two weeks ago, we announced the public launch of Stack Overflow in Portuguese , our first-ever non-English Stack Overflow community. Which raises one very obvious question: Have we lost our minds? Wasn't the whole point of Stack Overflow to aggregate as much developer knowledge as possible in one place? To get all the…
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”: The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration. The article cites…
