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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,056 posts.
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Google Search Is Dying
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
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My First Impressions of Web3
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do …
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Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
The US government has issued an export control directive suspending all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by foreign nationals inside or outside the US.
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Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
A statement from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War and national security uses of AI.
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Don't Fly During Ramadan
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
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The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used
This month marks the publication of "The Actual Star," a new, wildly ambitious, wildly successful novel by Monica Byrne, spanning 3,000 years of history from the ancient Maya to a distant future.
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YouTube-dl's repository has been restored
Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
During the Asia-Pacific Grandmasters broadcast over the weekend there was a competition rule violation during a post-match interview.
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I Am Deleting the Blog
[EDIT 2/13/21: This post is originally from June 2020, but there’s been renewed interest in it because the NYT article involved just came out. This post says the NYT was going to write a posi…
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My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.
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An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
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When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
Do not get arrested challenge 2020
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Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life
Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
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Keep Android Open
This Week in F-Droid TWIF curated on Friday, 20 Feb 2026, Week 8 F-Droid core During our talks with F-Droid users at FOSDEM26 we were baffled to learn most w...
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.name Termination
Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. It predates YouTube, Facebook, and smart phones. Minutes after my daughter was born, I also registered beverly.fraser.name .
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The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked.
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Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union
Apple announced changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store impacting developers’ apps in the EU to comply with the DMA.
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We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
Refuting the common and flawed argument of
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Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional
Government Must Have Reasonable Suspicion of Digital Contraband Before Searching Electronic Devices at the U.S. Border
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When did Google get so weird?
I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Understanding this Google se...
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