4501
Incentives are for losers
OR: you must look at this fish and go insane
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
4502
Why is everybody knitting chickens?
A couple years ago, my wife began knitting. And when she takes an interest in something, she goes all in. She’s a perfectionist about learning a new craft, so in a short amount of time, she’s gotten pretty damn good. I can’t even pretend to know anything
4503
The local timeline is the key to enjoying Mastodon
I'm sure you have already heard about Mastodon, typically marketed as a Twitter alternative. I will try to convince you that the word alternative doesn't mean here what you think it means, and why you may be using Mastodon wrong if you find it bori
4504
4505
4506
Don’t Fly During Ramadan (2013)
A couple of weeks ago, I tried to fly from New York (JFK) to Los Angeles on JetBlue. I was racially profiled, detained, and interrogated for hours.
4507
Did North Korea Really Attack Sony?
I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the US government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it. Clues in…
4508
The effects of algorithms on the public discourse
Big Tech broke the internet, and this old man’s got a few things to say about it.
4509
Twitter to decentralize something
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.
4510
Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
During the pandemic, I deleted most of my social media accounts. While social networks started as a great way to stay in touch - the websites evolved into addic...
4511
John Varley has died
. John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But...
4512
Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag …
4513
4514
AT&T, Time Warner, and the Need for Neutrality
It is no surprise that a judge allowed the AT&T-Time Warner acquisition to proceed given the government’s poor case; the question is if a better case could have been made. What is ultima…
4515
4516
How I attacked a fellow student
I’m a college student studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying a mixture of CS, Physics and Music. This semester I decided to take a course CIS551: Network and Computer Security, eager to learn about the field. This is the story of how as part of the course, I compromised the security of one […]
4517
Putting Down the Pen: Reflecting on Oryx’s Journey
By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans Dear everyone, I had always imagined 'penning' this farewell someday. You see, the journey of...
4518
Julia
An aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive.
4519
Sexy weasels in Renaissance art
Exploring the sexual symbolism hidden in paintings of weasels in Renaissance art
4520
Datamining Bandersnatch
You may have heard about Bandersnatch , an interactive film released on Netflix as part of the Black Mirror series. I’ve heard about it when it was released, but didn’t get around to watch it until recently, and I was surprised at how deep and thorough the implementation is. The film consists of:
4521
Reddit is undeleting years worth of comments and posts
Attached: 1 image Well fuck #reddit - they have just undeleted posts I made years ago that I'd removed when I did a purge a couple of years back. So Reddit didn't actually delete the data - also these videos are no longer on YT so the thumb is cached They are so fucked #gdpr…
4522
Why inflation is not a threat
I have just posted this thread on inflation on Twitter. It will feature in 'Money for nothing and my Tweets for free' in due course: Current debate about inflation isn’t really about whether it’s likely: it isn’t. Instead it’s about whose vision of the future is going to win. Is it...
4523
Stonks Are What You Can Get Away With: NFTs and Financial Nihilism
Eric Jang, "Ten Apes", Jun 19 2021. NFT "drop" coming soon. Andy Warhol once said, “Art is what you can get away with.” I interpret the qu...
4524
Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
Understanding “extend and pretend”
4525
The madness of the bailout in Cyprus
Last night the finance ministers of the eurozone decided on a bailout package for Cyprus. The small country with around 1 million inhabitants has an overstretched banking sector that is in dire straits. The primary reason for this is that the Cypriotic banks hold a lot of Greek sovereign debt – debt that took a…
4526
Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere
Even the ‘successful’ contact tracing apps have fallen well below expectations, and incapable of discovering their effectiveness.
4527
Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?
Social media companies have moderation SNAFUs on a near daily basis. Inevitably, the public and the tech press reacts with incredulity, “This company has so much money. How can they still be so bad…
4528
I can't pay rent because devs just don't care
Rent's due today, thank heavens I just got paid. I don't set up standing orders, got burned once with unarranged overdraft fees, that wasn't a good mont...
4529
4530