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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
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I stopped following the news
A personal reflection on the decision to stop following daily news and its impact on my well-being.
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Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The Hierarchy of Money
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
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Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets
How wind and solar quietly pushed gas off the margin, and the wholesale price followed.
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I think I hate the internet
I’ve just finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and was equally parts shocked and unsurprised by the events she witnessed at Facebook / Met...
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Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
A casual, roughly bimonthly Sunday coffee meetup for Hacker News posters in Helsinki. Open to anyone with 64+ HN karma.
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Rsync and outrage
I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…
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America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital
$6 trillion in patient capital, $60+ billion in annual fees, and the infrastructure that never gets built
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AI and the Ship of Theseus
Slopforks: what happens when a library gets rewritten with AI?
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Looks like it is happening
Update: Sorry, but a commenter points out that this may just be an artifact of counting based on when most recently modified, not on original submission date. Numbers using original, not most recen…
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Hacker News, Sans AI
I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on __AI__. Refreshes about every ten minutes.
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C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality
You might have heard that C2PA is a technology that will miraculously save us from rampant AI forgeries, by having cameras cryptographically sign the images they capture. Hooray for cryptography !
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I'm the AGI that's wiping out humanity
Alex Moon is an Australian-British software engineer and artist based in the North East of England.
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A directory of people who love RSS
Today, I launched I ♥ RSS, a directory for people who love RSS. I've already added the badge to my footer and submitted my site to the directory. It also shows a nice live blogroll on the homepage (powered by FeedLand). If you love RSS as much as I do, take a look and add …
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The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
Discover how communication patterns shape team performance, innovation, and collective intelligence. Learn why idea flow matters more than talent alone.
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I was right about ATProto key management
Note: this post has been revised to be split into two sections: a description of what happened, and my analysis. I hope to make it clear that, while I do not like ATProto in general, I am trying to make good-faith critcisms of specific design decisions and outcomes, and in fact, this post getting updoots on HackerNews…
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Aligned to whom?
You are relying very heavily on the priors of the model to do a good job for you. What happens when you cannot judge whether those priors are good?
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Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
What statistics can teach us about observing 3 deaths at Burning Man in 2026.
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The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral. Except if we look…
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Overcoming the friendship recession
My thoughts on the friendship recession and what I'm doing to maintain friendships.
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Just a little AI resistance, as a treat
At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One…
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Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally
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The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future of software, books, music, and movies, in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse, while the human-made variant moves into a luxury segment of its own.
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The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
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