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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
Adobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives,...
What happens when you responsibly disclose a critical vulnerability exposing personal data - including that of minors - and the organization responds with legal threats instead of a thank you?
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right…
AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!
OR: an apology to my English teachers
Read about the hidden divide between self-inflicted irrelevance and real engineering leverage.
Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns
Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team eventually rotated out, even the core strategy was…
We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America. The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.
The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit
It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.
AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to...
Xe Iaso's personal website.
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
If you’re willing to use AI-generated images, how do I know the text isn’t AI-generated?
An experiment in language change
The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open (yes, there are tens of us!), expecting to get some work done before my attention fragments. But Google had other plans. They had rolled out a new version of Antigravity the day before, at I/O 2026 , presenting it as a shiny, standalone Codex-style experience.
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
The event's Leave No Trace principle isn't just a promise — it's measured, mapped, and made public.
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from ordinary websites you visit. Any company that buys ads on ChatGPT installs
