2191
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
2192
LG Smart TVs log USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
Earlier this month I discovered that my new LG Smart TV was displaying ads on the Smart landing screen. After some investigation, I f...
2193
What We Get Wrong About Technology
Blade Runner (1982) is a magnificent film, but there’s something odd about it. The heroine, Rachael, seems to be a beautiful young woman. In reality, she’s a piece of technology — an organic robot …
2194
I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
Not only did I give internet strangers unrestricted access to send me completely anonymous physical messages, but I also self-hosted the entire site on a Raspberry Pi
2195
2196
Google, Our Patron Saint of the Closed Web
Lately there’s been a barrage of articles about how Apple is destroying the open web (because “app store, lol”) and it is Time Something Was Done About This: Apple’s paranoid appr…
2197
2198
The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
History is bound to repeat itself and it has almost every year
2199
Car Bloat: “Huge Cars Are Terrible for Society”
David Zipper, who researches and writes about mobility and transportation, recently did a big thread on Mastodon (and Bluesky) about car bloat: the way in which
2200
Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”
The popular book from the "world's most famous living psychiatrist" is riddled with blatant misrepresentations
2201
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen | exotext
2202
Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site
A personal account of building HeheStreams, facing the consequences, and going to prison as a startup founder who had a piracy website.
2203
Oura says it gets government demands for user data
Oura users' data is not end-to-end encrypted and can be handed to the government. Will the wearable tech maker say how often it turns over data?
2204
Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need
You know those things that, once you learn about them for the first time, you start seeing them absolutely everywhere? Recently, that’s been my experience with problem-solution ordering issues. They keep cropping up: not just in the context of gam...
2205
Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?
A new change in Iceland’s government means that joining the EU is back on the cards for Iceland.
2206
How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
2207
Statistics, we have a problem
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS) in…
2208
Please Pay for a Year of Nothing
This morning, two emails came in from Apple. The first was about the upcoming renewal of my yearly subscription to Disney+ and the second email was about the price increase of my Disney+ subscription from $79.99 to $109.99. It took me all of 10 seconds to think about it, but I canceled my subscription. It’s not really…
2209
A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks
Misinformation, labor impact, and safety are all risks. But not in the way the letter implies.
2210
2211
Let's Build a Traditional City and Make a Profit
Let's transform an old airport site into a Traditional City.
2212
The ever-increasing walled-gardeness of Twitter
Up until a few years ago, I used to feel good when sharing Twitter links. Compared to the other handful of websites that now make up our entire lives, it was the best option: Not a walled garden like Facebook or Instagram where you either don’t see any content at all or are bombarded with “sign up to continue” popups…
2213
Our efforts, in part, define us
What happens when something we enjoy doing that took effort becomes effortless? And what happens if that original effort was a foundation on which we saw value…
2214
2215
2216
2217
California is chasing wealth that has feet
California has $8.14 trillion in land sitting right under its feet. It's chasing billionaires instead.
2218
Costco Capitalism
Can consumers at Costco really have their free sample and eat it too?
2219
2220
What I Use Instead of Google
I made a goal for myself in January 2020 to stop using Google products by the end of the year. That might sound like way too generous a timeline, but…