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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Interesting speculation that the NSA is storing everyone’s phone calls, and not just metadata. Definitely worth reading. I expressed skepticism about this just a month ago. My assumption had always been that everyone’s compressed voice calls is just too much data to move around and store. Now, I don’t know. There’s a…
Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones. Their parents thought they w...
Or at least, your employer might be. Over the years we in the tech sector have gotten used to being well-regarded. After all, we make people’s lives better, on balance. That’s changing. At the moment it’s rumblings from thought leaders, not pervasive popular anger. The other thing that’s new is that they’re thought…
Dear client, Setting aside the challenges of using Zoom under ChromeOS and Linux, I have mostly been declining invitations to Zoom calls...
Your possessions came alive. Now they won't stop talking.
My mom and I had a daily practice for many years: We would exchange gratitude emails.
Some claims that test scores don’t predict college success don’t add up.
appearance vs. reality in art & business
We need more of Richard Stallman, not less par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
I block ads in the browser. I block ads at the DNS level.
'The Long Tail' was supposed to boost alternative voices in music, movies, and books—but the exact opposite happened. What went wrong?
In 1995, El Salvador had an intentional homicide rate of 139 per 100,000, the highest in the world and one of the highest rates recorded in modern history. Like all educated middle-class Americans,…
This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet: Store …
Trustpilot promises to be “free and open” — in reality, they are the exact opposite, holding companies at ransom, and outright violating…
What happens when innovation doesn’t fit the usual narratives?
