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Society, Policy & Culture

The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.

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2495

CSS-Tricks in Limbo

I’m sad to say that CSS-Tricks is stuck in limbo again. The site was acquired by Digital Ocean in 2022, and it continued to run under their ownership until February of 2023, when DigitalOcean fired the people working on it. The site stayed latent for a year before DigitalOcean re-hired lead editor Geoff Graham in June…

2497

Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers

Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That’s everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted—for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This “metadata” allows the…

2498

The kids with phones are alright

T here was a remarkable video going around the Scottish socials yesterday which led to quite a bit of media coverage . It’s a four-minute long video showing some furious Scotrail passengers confronting a drunk middle-aged pervert who is quietly filming a group of quiet, sober 16- and 17-year old girls heading home…

2502

Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

Infrastructure “We should own our infrastructure.” A lot of people would instinctively nod in agreement with that statement. Yet who “we” refers to shifts depending on the type of infrastructure. Highways, railways, bridges, and ports require nation-scale efforts. The water supply is usually put into the hands of…

2512

Is Web3 anything?

The term “web3” seems pretty fluid and is being used as a label for a bunch of disparate ideas. Given that it’s a decentralized group describing a decentralized movement, that lack of focus isn’t exactly surprising. Almost by definition it’s going to end up being different things to different people.

2514

No Recent Automation Revolution

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that for many years the media has been almost screaming that we entering a big automation revolution, with huge associated job losses, due to new AI tech, especially deep learning.

2519

Forget spaceships; I just want my music

A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?" They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least. But a few albums, like Bluey's soundtrack, transcend the children's genre. They're…