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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Maybe it's because I'm writing this at 2:00 AM, which is about the only time I let myself experience sadness for a prolonged period of time, but every time I see a post on Twitter or LinkedIn about a new development in AI, I feel a sense of hopelessness.
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
The First Amendment is not about a law, but rather a culture — specifically a culture of liberty. It is essential to tech, and in this context, Facebook is mostly right about political ads (but can…
Open Source Freelancer
One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
In So Long and Thank for All The Fish, the elegiac fourth book of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, Douglas Adams gives us this conversation between Arthur, a very ordinary Earth…
One tiny corner of Australia recognises "Australian Central Western Standard Time" (ACWST), an unofficial zone based on the quarter hour.
China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what ...
There are a lot of scams out there, but one that's been plaguing bloggers like me lately is a novel twist: A fake DMCA takedown notice that's actually a link insertion scam! Beware: The notices I'm getting are very convincing-looking, complete with a fake law firm website!
Recently I've been plagued with Tweets saying that I'm "trending in London." As flattering as that is, it's not true. There appears to be a network of Twitter bots which are randomly repeating other people's tweets, ripping off avatars and bios, and generally causing a nuisance. Looking at the users' Twitter name, I…
Over 15 years ago, I took my first device-free, silent, solitude experience.
If you don’t follow NSA news obsessively, you might have missed yesterday’s massive Snowden document dump from Der Spiegel. The documents provide a great deal of insight into how the NSA brea…
Last night the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a long statement about my Alan Turing petition that included a clear apology for...
All epidemics end, even the Black Death and Spanish Flu. But it won’t be abrupt, and mine may end before yours does.
These are the two most-streamed children's shows. Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.
Last month, I met with Eric, a fearless PM at a medium size startup who recently got into vibe coding with Gemini.
They told us elections were rigged. Then they cloned stolen voting software. Then they bought the voting machines.
In 2018 I applied for and received Permanent Residency in Japan. The process I used is relatively new and unknown so I wanted to document it in case it might come in handy for someone else.
My best piece of travel advice: don't do what the locals do.
For someone who has been a strong supporter of FOSS for a very long time, watching what has been happening to the various FOSS communities over the past half decade or so is kind of depressing (with some exceptions, of course).
For a very long time, it appeared obvious to outside observers of the time flow that Skynet would never win the war, and never annihilate humanity.
I look at the Japanese symbols that carry meaning entirely on their own.
