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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 580 posts.
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Google IP Vandalizing OpenStreetMap [Not a comprehensive post]
Two OpenStreetMap accounts have been vandalizing OSM in London, New York and elsewhere from Google’s IP address, the same address in India reported by Mocality.
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Nate Silver confuses cause and effect, ends up defending corruption
Crossposted on Naked Capitalism I just finished reading Nate Silver’s newish book, The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t. The good news First off…
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The Year 2512
Usually when I speculate about the future, I stick to two areas; either the really near future (within the next couple of decades), or the really far future (so far out that signs of continental drift should be glaringly obvious). But what about the medium term?
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To the Pirate Bay: a modest proposal
Back to: A writing experiment I plan to try | Forward to: PSA: Amazon order cancellations
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Goodbye Facebook.
Let’s get something straight: This is not a Facebook hate post. That being said, I’m running a little experiment of disabling my Facebook account. Why you ask? I first joined Facebook t…
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Getting around the London 2012 branding police
The Guardian reported the other day on the London 2012 Olympics branding police who ensure that words like London, 2012 or Games aren't be...
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Gmail security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks
Posted by Eric Grosse, VP Security Engineering We are constantly on the lookout for malicious activity on our systems, in particular attem...
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EFF: Stop Congress from Reauthorizing the Warrantless Spying Bill
We could be celebrating the New Year by ripping out the fiber optic cables that are sending copies of all our emails to the National Security Agency. But instead, Congress is planning on ringing in 2013 by re-authorizing parts of the FISA Amendments Act, the controversial 2008 bill that allows...
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UK chemist on Elsevier's ban on textmining
This is the first post of probably several in my concern about textmining. You do NOT have to be a scientist to understand the point with total clarity. This topic is one of the most important I have written about this year. We are at a critical point where unless we take action our scholarly rights will be further…
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My Brush With a Patent Troll
Back when the web was only a limited affair and the most exciting thing on it in the realm of imagery was the ‘coffee pot webcam’ I came up with a way to make a real live video stream that worked in a browser. A few months earlier I’d made a very basic version of this using ftp upload of images to a server and then a…
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iBookstore rejects Holly Lisle's writing course because she mentions Amazon
Lesson 6 includes my “Amazon River” technique, in which I show students how I use a couple of useful bits of Amazon’s website software and the Amazon database to figure out how to find alternative genres for their books if they aren’t having any luck selling it in the genre they wrote it for. I’ve successfully used…
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The Latest On Intelligence
You may remember The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and it argued that IQ is largely determined by genetics and little by the environment. It...