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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
Twenty-five years ago, I made my first donation to an open source project and purchased a CD with an operating system as downloading a few hundred megabytes over a 14.4kbps dial-up wasn't very fun.
In November 2017, I deactivated my account on Facebook. I didn’t leave Facebook for moral reasons back then but more because it was starting to feel like a waste of time and valuable brain cy…
Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan — a 13-year-old with an iPad app — sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
How I'm using Kagi Search with low vision to manage visual fatigue, plus my favorite Kagi accessibility features for low vision + CVI and Kagi low vision theme
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
A guest post on Georgism by Lars Doucet
Right now, any robocall hacker in the world can instantly take over your phone’s screen, knocking you out of your mobile gaming experience, disrupting you as you check out at the store, or breaking your concentration as you try and type out an email.
This is a different type of post. Here, instead of presenting the voice of a single person, I have translated selected stories shared on Weibo and elsewhere on the Chinese Internet—or more fittingl…
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars…
And so we face the ultimate irony: 'bailing-out-everything' destroys the entire rotten system. You've probably noticed things no longer ...
I’ve been meaning to write this one for a while, but the announcement of the Ladybird Browser Initiative makes now a particularly good time.
Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum , proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of…
On January 6th, 1995 two bank robbers in Pittsburgh confused law enforcement by not making any attempts to conceal their faces but instead brazenly looking at security cameras as if they were invisible. The reason is that they actually thought they were.
It will take about three minutes to read this column. Whether it’s worth three minutes depends on me, of course. I will do my best. But it also depends on you, on your attitude to time and, perhaps…
Early websites. In the beginning, website HTML was crafted by hand. Your average personal — or corporate — website might consist of hand-edited HTML subsequently uploaded, probably via FTP, to a web server which knew only how to serve static files.
European public institutions are betting big on digital sovereignty and open source software. And yet they recently moved their Bluesky accounts to W Social, a private, for profit network owned by Swedish entrepreneurs that has quietly gone closed-source.
Information addiction is rotting our brains
In a blowout comedy for the ages, finance pirates take it up the clacker
Last week, CIA director John Brennan told a Senate committee that there wasn’t any strong cryptography outside of the US. CIA director John Brennan told US senators they shouldn’t worry about mandatory encryption backdoors hurting American businesses. And that’s because, according to Brennan, there’s no one else for…
Disability, shame, and the hidden violence of a culture that equates productivity with value
What happens when journalists don't have any friends in finance to challenge their thinking?
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.
New data on the Sideways effect
