Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. Training a model to believe it might be a moral patient, as Anthropic’s constitution does, makes the alignment and containment challenge far harder.
Rescuing a field from disappearing
Small local libraries are now becoming travel destinations
We all learned in science class that water freezes at 0 °C or 32 °F at atmospheric pressure. But what water, exactly? Even after you distill out all the dissolved salts and minerals to get pure H2O…
There is a moment in every investigation where the thing you have been looking for finds you instead.
Recently, I felt like I was seeing more "Show HN" stories, and many of which were generated with LLMs. So I analyzed the data to see if that was true. Also I included the average score per month to see if people enjoy seeing them (because I don't :P).
Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is a song about regret, asking for forgiveness, and wanting another chance after having hurt someone. But philosophically speaking, what exactly makes an apology morally meaningful?
The balance of software copyright protection and openness has always been fraught with minutiae and detail that bores all but the most nerdy of pedants. Yet, through much effort and 40 years of debate we had reached an equilibrium. Now AI has thrown that out the window.
The "Stop Killing Games" movement is making progress with the advancement of California AB 1921, a bill designed to stop developers from permanently bricking games when they shut down their servers. If you're a gamer who has watched a $70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon overnight, you're entirely justified…
I like things that are strange and a bit obscure. It’s a habit of mine, and a lot of this blog is to document things I haven’t heard of before, because I wan...
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
This tool was designed to get a sense of the differences in energy consumption between different products. It's often difficult to understand whether activities matter a lot or very little for our overall energy consumption.
War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by “we” I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who are morphing into a hereditary aristocracy. [I mean that, see below.] So, what to do in a war one didn’t choose?
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
I have been thinking a lot lately about these two fellows. If you are not lucky enough to know them already, those are Harold and George from the Captain Underpants series of books (among others)…
A recent U.S. college degree long meant lower unemployment than the average worker. That edge flipped in 2019, and the gap is now the widest on record.
I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details…
Why I wouldn't enjoy returning to radio as a disk jockey.
Does AI-assisted cognition threaten human development? Explore the risks of AI-assisted thinking and learn strategies to use AI tools without freezing your critical thinking.
A complete crawl of every restored link from 2009 to 2014 found that 76.7% no longer return a loading page.
How NAT broke the concept of an internet connection
The largest tell for me to tell where culture and sentiment is shifting for AI tools is usually X, viral GitHub repositories and Hacker News. One of these tells I’ve been seeing a lot lately is skills like I have ADHD and Agents.md instructions such as giving outputs in only ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
Soon, access to frontier AI will be scarce and selective
This case involves Project Bluebird, a social media service previously named “twitter.new” and renamed to tweet.app immediately after this ruling (for reasons this post makes obvious). Project Bluebird’s service is designed to reimagine the Twitter service that Musk imploded when...
On human connection after the Singularity.
The economics behind where movies are filmed, why Hollywood left Los Angeles, and whether audiences can tell the difference.
