571
Codeberg Divides
Codeberg drew a democratic, but suboptimal line.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
572
I'm tired of being on the network
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone
573
Good people refuse to do bad things
On the responsibility of engineers
574
Image of our satellite-choked night skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. Thi
575
Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change
1 in 4 American workers stay in their jobs because of the healthcare. It suppresses wages and working conditions - and prevents innovators from heading out on their own.
576
I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
I made 20 GDPR data deletion requests in the past year. 2 complied immediately. 6 complied after I filed complaints with data protection offices. 12 still haven't. The regulation exists, the enforcement doesn't.
577
The future of independence is interdependence
Every one of us depends on others; the only difference is how visible that dependence is.
578
Just Put It on a Map
An underrated strategy for urbanist persuasion, powered by open source tools
579
Bye Bye Gmail
TLDR: Please remove @gmail.com as my primary email address and substitute removed . I will try to respond to email sent to @gmail.com but no guarantees.
580
The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
An S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
581
The AI Great Leap Forward
In 1958, Mao ordered every village to produce steel. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Today's top-down AI mandates are producing the same pattern: ba...
582
Notes from the SF peptide scene
Pulling together disparate thoughts from two weeks wandering around SF
583
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
584
Treason in the Futures Markets
People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets
585
Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
586
Why I don't think AGI is imminent
The CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic have both claimed that human-level AI is just around the corner — and at times, that it's already here. These claims have generated enormous public attention. There has been some technical scrutiny of these claims, but critiques rarely reach the public discourse. This piece is a sketch…
587
The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things. Luckily, there's the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a department wants to buy…
588
Ideas aren't getting harder to find (2022)
You can still discover stuff, I promise
589
U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for "Armageddon,"
Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military
590
90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective
The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries (Stratton in the Senate race, Ford in H-07) or supporting their opponents. The PACs' only victories in the state…
591
Erich von Däniken has died
It is with great sadness and shock that we must announce that Erich von Däniken passed away on January 10, 2026.
592
How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread
How a Hertfordshire research lab quietly transformed an iconic British staple food, and the complexion of the countryside - without anyone actually noticing
593
I don't enjoy the Internet any more
The pale is growing
594
You are falling behind because you haven't fed the insincerity machine
I was lucky enough to witness the beginnings of social media, working on the platforms that made it happen. I’ve also seen the decline of its first iterations and products. Currently I am witnessing the idea of a social web being perverted, weaponised and automated out of any trace of human or social aspect…
595
The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
Have you heard? There's map news!
596
Claude is a Contrarian
Of all the LLMs I’ve used and driven daily, Claude is the one that absolutely contradicts my instructions.
597
AI optimism is a class privilege
I think I have an idea why we're so extremely divided on AI: it's because we have an intuitive sense of who it stands to benefit, and who stands to pay the costs. I think whether you see reason for optimism has a lot to do with which group you see yourself in.
598
Ad-tech is fascist tech
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
599
Making the Internet Boring
I once overrode my own website blocker for 444 minutes. After that I stopped relying on willpower and started making the internet boring: app deletions, LeechBlock, grayscale mode, and a custom userscript.
600
Seeing like a spreadsheet
How the commercial spreadsheet reshaped America