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How Breakfast Became a Thing
Do you think breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Then you fell for an ad campaign designed in 1944 to sell more cereal.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 658 posts.
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Why NSA Surveillance Scares Me
Nothing To Hide explains why you should care about surveillance even though you have nothing to hide. But it missed the point that most con...
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Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot
Adding data to the debate
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How Police Officers Seize Cash from Innocent Americans
Under civil forfeiture laws, police officers can take money from people with no proof of any wrongdoing, and without filing criminal charges. How does this work, and what happens to the money?
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Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
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My simplified response to Paul Graham's simplified essay
Paul Graham published a simplified version of his essay on income inequality . Here's my simplified response: It is true that many social...
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The Moral Economy of Tech
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .
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Communicating with people on psychedelics
About 18 months ago I had a really cool idea: What if we could communicate with people who are high on LSD in such a way that sober people can’t understand?* I call this idea psychedel…
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To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…
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European Union dedicated questionnaire on the Encryption of Data
On both sides of Atlantic the debate around strong cryptography frequently resurfaces. Proponents of weakening cryptography or introduction of backdoors (or "golden keys") cite national security. Technologists and activists oppose such proposals, citing freedoms and cybersecurity. Regulating cryptography is of course…
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Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment
Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr) You can read what you probably came here for at archive.org But if you’ll allow me first: Bringing people together is my life’s work. The text that was originally …
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Researchers use light to coax stem cells to repair teeth (2014)
Noninvasive laser therapy could radically shift dental treatment and lead to a host of broader clinical applications in regenerative medicine
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Why do so few humans kill themselves?
The always-excellent @ctrlcreep eloquently states a puzzle in 140 characters that it took me lots of words to express previously. This puzzle is expressed at the outset of C. A. Soper’s artic…
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NSA Hacked French President’s House
“Keith Alexander (Director of the NSA) told me he was disappointed because he never thought we would detect them and he even added: You guys are good.” Bernard Barbier French newspaper …
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The Fining of Black America
We analyzed the cities most likely to generate substantial revenues from fines. The best indicator that a government will levy excessive fines? If a large proportion of the city's citizens are Black.
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Rogue One – An Engineering Ethics Story
Written by Zachary G. Pirtle. Originally published anonymously. Reflects my views alone. This post went viral when published in 2016, with comments by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing , Marginal Revolution, and others. I’ve published other research on science fiction and policy that I discuss on my a
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Dear Al-Jazeera: thank you for doing the right thing
Our AI transforms your ideas into immersive, interactive stories in just a few clicks — built to drive 17x more engagement than static pages.
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What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1959 The films North by Northwest and Ben-Hur, the play A Raisin in the Sun, the books The Naked Lunch and Starship Troopers, the first episodes of The Twilight Zone, and more. . . Current US law…
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What HP Must Do to Make Amends for Its Self-Destructing Printers
Tell HP: Say No to DRM. Dion Weisler President and CEO HP Inc. 1501 Page Mill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 September 26, 2016 Dear Mr. Weisler, I write to you today on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to defending technological freedom, human rights and privacy in...
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Rule 41 Proposes to Grant New Hacking Powers to the Government
The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? It’s not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. It’s a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court procedures—and if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December. The proposal comes from the...
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100M Photos – Geotagged, Connected, and Available for All
Last year I wrote a blog post when we hit 10 million photos, to mark the date and thank everyone who helped us get there together. Today, we just passed 100 million.
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Let’s replace Twitter with something much better
(There is also a Russian language version of this post available, translated and published by SoftDroid on 2017-04-12.) I love Twitter. I love that by following certain people, my timeline has become a stream of interesting and entertaining information. I love that sometimes I am able to fit my little publication just…