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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
George Orwell? Alfred Harmsworth? William Randolph Hearst? L. E. Edwardson? Robert W. Sawyer? Mark Rhea Byers? Brian R. Roberts? Malcolm Muggeridge? Katharine Graham? Lord Rothermere? Lord Northcliffe? Anonymous?
rant and building of the slop YOLO project to detect other slop YOLO projects
How a new X feature led to the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since 2016.
State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.
In this final post of a three-part series, we discuss how Apple's approach to content is an anticompetitive slippery slope.
Feeding slop is an act of war
The Privacy Whisperer, by Luiza Jarovsky
Measuring Economic Productivity Is Pretty Much Bullshit -- We Should Be Measuring Well-Being Catalysis Instead
The editorial department of well-known Dutch broadcaster RTL News recently asked for my assistance. Multiple tax files of Dutch citizens had been published via www.docplayer.nl and no one could explain – where did these files come from? Who would have thought that my research would lead to the discovery of one of the…
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
Selections from the Washington Post's Gilded Age coverage of notable visitors to the city
It should not be difficult to love Amazon. To consumers, it offers choice and convenience. Countless internet ventures have relied on its cheap, flexible cloud computing services to start and scale…
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is ...
As an enlightened, modern parent , I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company…
I thought it would be interesting to see whether ChatGPT could solve some basic ciphers (Caesar, Vignere, etc.). I decided to start at the bottom, with perhaps the easiest possible cipher: rot13. I asked it to decode the rot-13 encoding of “Why did the chicken cross the road”: So the first thing to note here is that…
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
When software developers write code, they often use tools called IDEs, integrated development environments, that provide contextual information needed to manage the complexity of modern software. What would such a workspace look like, if it were designed for journalism?
Amazon removed purchased e-books from Kindles when a publisher had second thoughts about online distribution.
Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people—including President Obama—discounted the seriousness of the NSA’s actions by saying that it’s just metadata. Lots and lots…
Note – This is a true story based on my own experiences and what I’ve heard from the people involved, but for privacy, all of the names have been changed. Note 2 – This is an old piece, repub…
First of all I need the preface this article on how much I abhor the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I wholeheartedly support the sanctions. However, I think the conflict has spilled over into areas of software development that have got some unintended consequences attached. As part of this post, I’m going to look at…
