Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
The Internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can’t be monetized and thus don’t have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. Services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries - software without which the net and…
Humbolt was captivated by lush nature but loved humanity and the new technological developments. He believed that if we understand Nature and the laws governing her, we can create a sustainable future. He was the first Solarpunk and here are his ideas
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
Sputnik V clinical trial data seems as trustworthy as Putin’s election results.
There may be times and places where it’s a good idea to talk back to a military officer — but Germany in 1906 wasn’t one of them. So the young corporal didn’t. The corporal — let’s call him Muller …
Viewed in the proper light, influencer is a career path of tragic dimensions.
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…
Twelve years ago I posted on how our era is a rare unique “dreamtime” of fast growth, wide cultural integration, and delusional beliefs.
What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can…
What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years. I have sold to and bought from Amazon in about as many ways as one person can; I built an auto parts brand …
When the Romans came to Great Britain, they built a bunch of forts called castra, which was Anglicized to chester. So, English cities whose names end in -chester, -caster and -cester were once Roma…
Introduction
In the late 1990s, eurozone wannabes squeezed and stretched to meet the criteria for accession, including low inflation and government deficits, and moderate levels of debt. The criteria were somew…
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
On the irony of cameras built to police Iranians becoming the regime’s Achilles’ heel
I have been teaching about legal reasoning and legal argumentation for years. When I do so, I try to impress upon students that legal argume...
Fired at 17 for leaking secrets. Served a cybercrime ring. Named by the Social Security whistleblower. Now the government’s model employee.
For decades, social psychologists have understood that the link between attitudes and conduct is convoluted, if not weak. Both online and offline, this is
In life, love, war, and planetary colonization, even long-lasting friendships can end if one betrays the other's trust for his own gain. We studied the language of betrayal by observing players of Diplomacy , the game that ruins friendships . In this very popular game, players can form alliances and try to conquer the…
This post is about the reason I will probably never try to warn any organisation in Belgium about any vulnerability again. Recently I have been dealing with an attempt at coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) with an organisation in Belgium. This post is not about that, because I’m not allowed to write about it…
If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people.[David Okrent]
