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Society, Policy & Culture

The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 326 posts.

2025
121

Future of OSU Open Source Lab in Jeopardy

I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab (OSL). Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While the Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in…

129

The NO FAKES act has changed, and it's worse

A bill purporting to target the issue of misinformation and defamation caused by generative AI has mutated into something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out.The Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act aims to...

131

In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder

John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know. He made real the idea – revolutionary in its...

143

AI as Normal Technology

We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology . To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the…

150

The Brief Origins of May Day

Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country…