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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…
Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The mar…
When I was in high school, my teacher once told us a crazy story.
Persistent shortfalls in domestic savings, requiring funds from abroad to finance domestic investment spending, could be why the U.S. runs a trade deficit.
Thoughts on FOSS and fintech, layered by Mahmoud Hashemi
We cannot fix probability with more probability. We need to re-introduce assert.
I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which…
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
A week ago I attended LessOnline, a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl…
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks…
How a new X feature led to the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since 2016.
Feeding slop is an act of war
With 2024 now behind us, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the growth and achievements we accomplished as a community last year, and celebrate the inc...
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is ...
The rise and fall of yogh
How algorithm-driven influence quietly replaces genuine discourse with engineered popularity.
A follow up to The Ofcom Files. Some notes on Ofcom’s strategy to date. As many of you know, I represent the U.S. website 4chan, pro bono, in its U.S. federal lawsuit against the UK…
Where has all the weirdness gone?
Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here’s a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don’t. …
How the redesign of a street in a walkable college town reflects our broader values for cars over people.
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
There's a corner of the Internet where people have been reclaiming their digital independence by hosting their own websites and promoting the idea of owning your own content. It's called the IndieWeb. The community has its own website , IRC channels, social media presence, etc. as well
One in three top 10 Hacker News posts in August 2025 were AI-related. Can we pinpoint when this trend started?
And the results surprised me
