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Let's call a murder a murder
Caitlin Callenson’s courage in the face of insane danger is just remarkable.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals
OR: the long overdue forest fire
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2025 Letter
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
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Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"
Trump admin sees China behind opposition to AI data centers
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There are no "rogue" AI agents
Identifying them as such only lets companies like OpenAI off the hook.
306
Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
A personal blog, by a programmer and IT expert. Essays, Articles, Guides, and Recipes. As well as Code, Quotes, and Links.
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Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries
If signed, Seattle will become the first city in the nation to prohibit the pricing tactic Seattle, Washington – The Seattle City Council today passed…
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Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
(And everyone knows it)
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The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
A fictitious Sean Byrne ended up on a U.S. government restricted-party list. Sixteen years later, Apple, Nasdaq and others have mistaken me for him.
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The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and …
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AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You
Certainly the industry is transforming, however, the people and organizations falling into the trap of no longer reading and writing code only do so at their peril.
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A4 Paper Stories
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen…
316
How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
317
Declining America
Recently I got an invitation from an organization I respect, to a gathering of senior people, unconference format. Yes, it’s mostly about AI. No, it doesn’t reek of boosterism. My guess is that the discussions would be relatively intelligent and unbeliever contributions would be welcome. I declined, because it’s in…
318
Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair
Researchers analyzed samples of Utahns' hair going back a century to document a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations.
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UK media fails to disclose defence sector links in nearly 60% of cases
Here AOAV finds that UK media outlets frequently present retired senior military figures as independent defence experts without disclosing their commercial ties to defence, security, intelligence, and technology industries, potentially obscuring conflicts of interest in public debates over war and military spending.
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Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2026!
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Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
Last year, Canada's Bill C-2 was so bad it didn’t even make it to committee because of the backlash from the privacy community. Now, the spring’s worst sequel, Bill C-22, aka The Lawful Access Act, is trying it again.
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The AI Aesthetic
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of…
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Our Agreement with the Department of War
Details on OpenAI’s contract with the Department of War, outlining safety red lines, legal protections, and how AI systems will be deployed in classified environments.
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Shunning AI is the human choice
LinkedIn may be awash with boosters, but shunning AI is the human choice.
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Everybody's Lost Their Minds
The AI brain worms have been spreading and I don't have a solution, I just want to get off this ride.
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CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3
The word is on the street: the Chaos Computer Club is hosting 40C3 from 27 to 30 December 2026 – Europe’s biggest hacker party, conference and platform for technology, society and civil liberties. We understand the Congress to be a huge shared stage and therefore invite you to help shape it. The Call for Participation…
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So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?
EFF is against age gating and age verification mandates, and we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented. But mandates are already in effect, and every day many people are asked to verify their age across the web, despite prominent cases of sensitive data getting leaked in the process.
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Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal b…