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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 715 posts.
Ozempic-style drugs are being tested far beyond diabetes, for heart failure, addiction, Alzheimer's and aging. The share of such trials has roughly tripled in fifteen years.
Leak show feds tracking anti-ICE Reddit users like "Budget-Chicken-2425"
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
the gospel for those out of distribution
I constantly hear about how much everybody hates email. Look, I receive just as many spam messages and useless email-based notifications and stuffy vapid “regarding my previous email” work messages as the next gal. I get it. But I’ve found there’s something magical about email as a medium of communication, and as a…
And that’s a problem for economic development
Prompted by letters from three engineers, the author asks what remains for humans as AI takes over execution, naming judgment, taste, and derivation as irreplaceable, and warns against the erosion of subjecthood.
The implicit contract — work hard, stay employed, build a life — is broken.
How did we get here? And how do we get back?
TL;DR: 62% as of September 2026. This is up from ~40% in February.
Oof, what a beauty. In the 1960s, four Porsche 912s were customized for use as police cars in Japan. This one, which was used in Kanagawa until 1973, is the onl
If you're not a screen reader user yourself, you might be surprised to learn that the text to speech technology used by most blind people hasn't changed in the last 30 years. While text to speech has taken the sighted world by storm, in everything from personal assistants to GPS to telephone systems, the voices used…
On the irony of cameras built to police Iranians becoming the regime’s Achilles’ heel
Fired at 17 for leaking secrets. Served a cybercrime ring. Named by the Social Security whistleblower. Now the government’s model employee.
Series: I read it so you don't have to
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
I have a weird soft spot for roundabouts. Maybe because I'm a software engineer and the roundabout strikes me as the simple, elegant solution while the traffic light intersection is the ad-hoc, over-engineered mess.
What the **** does that mean?
One way of studying literature is through direct experience.
The brain sandwich is a practical AI coding workflow: understand the problem, let an agent help, then verify and explain its work before sharing it.
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.
Palantir took Epstein’s money, Thiel’s backing, and Trump’s blessing to build an AI war machine. If Gaza is the testing ground, America’s next. Are we ready to fight back?
In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as…
