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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
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Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred…
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The Dutch government wants automatic permission to target victims of hackers
This is a mirror of the original about:intel post, since the about:intel server is sadly sometimes overloaded. Also do read the opposing view from Jan-Jaap Oerlemans and the reflection by Lotte Houwing The Dutch government is proposing adding a lex specialis to its existing intelligence and security services act. This…
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/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification
The moment /r/antiwork died was tailor-made for infamy. Head moderator Doreen Ford went on with Fox host Jesse Watters for an interview…
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How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising
Gerrymandering distorts the will of the people, but the basic math of geographic representation makes it difficult to get rid of, unless we get rid of representation for geographic districts.
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How much of HN is AI?
TL;DR: 62% as of September 2026. This is up from ~40% in February.
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So thieves broke into your storage unit again
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story. All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by ...
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We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future
UPDATE: This is now the topic of my South by Southwest proposal. Please go vote for and comment on it here. We're not going to have a jobless recovery....
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Lie still in bed
One of the most impactful pieces of advice I ever got was just to lie still in bed.
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If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999
Shane Frederick points us to this article from 1999 , “Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance,” about which he writes:
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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
About a year ago I wrote on this blog about how coding with LLMs would not work for me, even if there were no ethical or environmental concerns preventing me to use them. I'm not going to repeat the…
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Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx
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New Defaults
The pandemic and vaccine rollout have highlighted where the West has lost its way; we need new defaults about information, change, and speed.
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Steelmanning: Discover the truth by helping your opponent
Tackle the steelmanning challenge, a three-step method to win arguments by helping your opponent. Its only downside: Nobody will ever take it.
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This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach
"The conversation I'm going to have with my parents now that I've turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job," he said.
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Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly?
Linux phones now have the hardware and software to succeed, but it is an open question whether they will become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
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Snap updates happen without user consent
Recent versions of Ubuntu turned on a particularly annoying feature: intrusive system notifications that warn of the pending update of a Snap managed application. Here’s an example:
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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
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Did I receive fraudulent DMCA takedowns?
I received 3 DMCA takedown emails today, covering 7350 URLs on my hardbin.com IPFS gateway. The URLs were allegedly serving infringing copies of books. The strange part is that of those 7350 URLs, during the time for which I have nginx logs, none of them have ever been accessed , and of the ones that I checked, none…
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How the NSA Threatens National Security
Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programs continue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassified additional information, and the President’s Review Group has just released its report and recommendations. With all this going on, it’s easy to become…
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Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
A new way to think about brainpower.
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On the 10th anniversary of the Snowden revelations
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment