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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
ICE is using a smartphone app called “Mobile Fortify” to scan faces and capture contactless fingerprints, instantly pulling back names and biographical data — and court filings say the same encounters are being followed by revocations of Global Entry and TSA PreCheck. That turns “trusted traveler” into chilling of…
“We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper insight than it seems. Young people spend years in school learning the reverse: understanding happens before progress. That is the linear theory of innovation. So Isaac Newton comes up with his three laws of mechanics, and we get…
Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batterie…
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
The Mondrian Trust claims a 1930 painting is still protected—citing "dual copyrights," Spanish law, and a misreading of the Copyright Act.
Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is, kept by a UCLA lecturer in his spare time. We counted who maintains the code under your phone.
Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content.
The US dollar lost 96.9% of its value since 1914. Four inflationary episodes spanning 29% of the time caused 72% of the destruction. Monthly dataset, 1,357 obs.
A personal blog, by a programmer and IT expert. Essays, Articles, Guides, and Recipes. As well as Code, Quotes, and Links.
I would like you to know that we passengers are trying our best. To you, this place makes sense -- you come here every day. You speak the lingo. You kno...
He worked with computers; she worked with trees, and the flowers that took hold on the sides of the Mountain.
In a time before crypto, Twitter, and AI slop, we had communities, real experiences, and beautiful TV…
Back in 2022 and 2023 there were two big branches of machine learning happening at Meta1. The LLM work that led to Llama was a clean, smooth stack of repeated Transformer modules; the recommendatio…
A week of cyber incidents one after another – is this what every week is going to look like and what can we do about it?
Trying to obfuscate the web is a bad, pointless idea
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging
A fabulously gay blind Romance author.
If you’re the sun, I’m a black hole – The Stephen Hawking, Say Anything
On the Strait of Hormuz, fertility research, and the millions of dollars bet on artificial wombs that missed the point
I used to think Google owning the full vertical stack was a masterstroke. Like TSMC silicon, TPUs, their own data centers, proprietary models, search engine....
New immigration rules for the UK are being enforced starting February 2026. This means citizens of 85 additional countries (including the USA and European countries) will need an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) to visit, even for tourism. Luckily, you can apply (and pay) digitally. Unfortunately, the government…
The US will need a lot more tungsten in the future. Where will it come from?
OR: The Great Switcheroo
This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s har
The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered"…
Of all the forms of tech debt, decoherence is the worst. It compounds exponentially with a system's rate of change, and AI is now producing it faster than ever, leading us deeper and deeper into the abyss...
AI plays well at complex strategy games with uncertainty and incomplete information.
Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported piece in Chalkbeat, where Khan himself acknowledged that…
