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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 658 posts.
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GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa
Money always helps, but for the poorest, one large lump sum can last a long time. A long-term universal basic income also looks promising.
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U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages
The Supreme Court issued an important ruling today in the long-running patent battle between Apple and Samsung. The appeal involved some of Apple’s infamous design patents on rounded corners. The Federal Circuit had ruled that Apple was entitled to all of Samsung’s profits from the infringing...
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Ranking TV Shows That Got Canceled
What do the TV shows Firefly, Twin Peaks, and Freaks and Geeks all have in common?
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Debian turns 23
Today is Debian's 23rd anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities celebrating Debian Day 2016, you're very welcome to join the party! If not, there's still time for you to organize a little celebration or contribution to Debian....
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CIA Director John Brennan Pretends Foreign Cryptography Doesn't Exist
Last week, CIA director John Brennan told a Senate committee that there wasn’t any strong cryptography outside of the US. CIA director John Brennan told US senators they shouldn’t worry about mandatory encryption backdoors hurting American businesses. And that’s because, according to Brennan, there’s no one else for…
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How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain
Every time Disney’s beloved mouse is about to enter the public domain, U.S. copyright law magically changes. Does he deserve special protection, or should he be relinquished to society?
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Why the Sun 2 has a message “Love your country, but never trust its government”
Yesterday, Alec Muffet posted a few tweets regarding the Sun SPARC 2 bootloader’s DES routines.
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Of course Zuckerberg wants to bow to Chinese censorship
Remember when Zuckerberg dared to wear a hoodie to his IPO party?The easiest way to be disappointed is to expect others to act contrary to their self-interest. So really, we shouldn’t be disappoint…
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T-Mobile’s Binge On Optimization is Just Throttling, Applies Indiscriminately
Back in November, T-Mobile announced a new service for its mobile customers called Binge On, in which video streams from certain websites don’t count against customers’ data caps.[fn]To be fair, T-Mobile’s plans don’t have traditional data caps—they just slow down to “2G” speeds once customers...
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The internet has made defensive writers of us all
I was struck by this passage in Steven Pinker’s article about why academics’ writing stinks :
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Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro
The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.
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The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
“Prince is synonymous with indulging in yourself shamelessly and with passion. His music and his cultural impact mean more than words can offer.” “He taught me that being black wa…
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Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment
Defenders of the NSA's mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. That argument has always been dubious for a number of...
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Make the Web Work for Everyone
Updated 2016/07/22: Commenters found a few data errors (thanks!) which have now been corrected. Millions of websites have compatibility problems on one or more of the major browsers, leading to ...
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My Priorities for the Next Four Years
Like many, I was surprised and shocked by the election of Donald Trump as president. I believe his ideas, temperament, and inexperience represent a grave threat to our country and world. Suddenly, all the things I had planned to work on seemed trivial in comparison. Although Internet security and privacy are not the…
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Why Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Violates the First Amendment
EFF filed an amicus brief today in support of Apple's fight against a court order compelling the company to create specific software to enable the government to break into an iPhone. The brief is written on behalf of 46 prominent technologists, security researchers, and cryptographers who develop...
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An American Doctor Experiences the NHS Again
Two years ago I wrote about my experience in a London emergency department with my son, Victor. That post has since been viewed > 450,000 times. There are over 800 comments with no trolls (a fea…
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MathML is a failed web standard
Since I'm expecting more than my 1 2 regular readers to read this, let me add a preface. I've been managing the MathJax project for 4 years now. In the last two years, I've also been consulting for publishers regarding math-related workflows, in particular TeX-to-XML and XML-to-web, both on the back and front-end. Not…