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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,147 posts.
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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
Context: 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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Coffee Is Hard
Way back in the 80s, some people had a dream of combining the cutesy graphics of 80s visual games and the soul-crushing difficulty of 80s text adventures. And so Sierra On-Line created quest games.
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The map that keeps Burning Man honest
The event's Leave No Trace principle isn't just a promise — it's measured, mapped, and made public.
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ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from ordinary websites you visit. Any company that buys ads on ChatGPT installs
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If you opened your PayPal account before you were 18, close it
Everyone knows a horror story about PayPal, I’ve had several painful experiences with them over the last decade, but now I’ll never have to…
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Face it: you're a crazy person
OR: why your brain needs a boxcutter
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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
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On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
I’ve had Feeling Hard Or Hardly Feeling saved to my hard drive since 7-17-2005 without even knowing who made it. Just now bothered to find out.
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Slack's bait and switch
Slack has finally decided to close down their IRC and XMPP gateways. True to form, you can only read their announcement if you already have a Slack account and…
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What happened to nerds?
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
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If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room
Live chat is for things that can get lost.
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We must pace the frontier
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and…
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Daring Fireball: Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot
Rest in peace.
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A Walk in Hong Kong
My mom fainted the first time she set foot in an American supermarket. It was 1981 and we were freshly arrived in America, and some combination of the culture shock and smell and sensory overload of a Safeway was too much for her, not normally a fainting woman.
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Forgotten Employee (2002)
PART ONE An epiphany was had this morning as I perused SA, sipping Code Red and toying with the notion of stepping outside for my third cigarette in an hour: Nine years and 2 months of my life have been devoted towards the goal of personal advancement within a small yet thriving company. I
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Dear Spotify, please let me unlink my Facebook account
Please let me unlink my Facebook account
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What really happened at PyCon 2013
We are hearing a lot about what happened at PyCon 2013, but most of what is being passed around tells only a tiny part of what really happened. Here’s how PyCon went for me this year: The Ed…
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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
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TSA Pressures Mainstream Media Not To Cover Story
I’ve been on the phone all day for the last 2 days with reporters and journalists of all kinds, including the big bad MSM, and one South Florida reporter told me that he had been “stron…
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In Defense of Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, most…
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IRS Direct File on GitHub
Personal blog of Chris Given, government technologist. These words are always written by a human; I have no one to blame but myself.