Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers? Update: seemingly not Update: Oh yeah!
Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the...
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers” 1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its…
In recent weeks, we pointed Mythos and other security-focused LLMs at live code across critical parts of our infrastructure. We share what we observed, the models’ strengths and weaknesses, and what the work around them needs to look like before any of it can scale.
A technical look at the EU age verification reference app — the gap between marketed and shipped cryptography, relay attacks the protocol can't stop, and why the 'privacy-preserving' system is a trojan horse for digital ID infrastructure.
It seems that no matter what you do, somebody will get offended. Every Windows 95 box has an anti-piracy hologram on the side. The photographer chose his
AI has changed vulnerability discovery, but closing source code does not remove the attack surface. Continuous AI defense is the better response.
Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known. Here's the thing. No. All my blog posts start with a simple declaration: Copied…
We're not in a February 2020 moment, and ordinary people will be fine
These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an…
Two lawyers hid a white-on-white instruction inside a court filing telling the AI to go easy on their case. The court's AI caught it. The fine was $16,000.
Some days I get in bed after a tortuous 4-5 hour session working with Claude or Codex wondering what the heck happened. It's easy to blame the model - there'...
Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have...
Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas. Home . Site Map . Subscribe . More at expLog . — Kunal
An archive of this year’s insane timeline of hacks few people are talking about
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
La Jolla, California—April 29, 2026—The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) announced that J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., the Institute’s founder,...
A couple months ago we had a post, This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it. which was about…
My great-great-grandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too. He was a farrier in Mandres-en-Barrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up.
One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides "what is taking up all my cloud storage?") is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don't want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment. Maybe you lik
The unfortunately botched economics of emergency care
When I got my first real job, I used to get so nervous about writing emails to my boss. I would run spellcheck, triple-check the grammar, read over it again ...
Sometimes the law is not the law
Reasoning scores climb while per-token compute drops. Labs are stripping world knowledge out of models, and I think that's the right trade.
What we lose when we no longer have to learn how our computers work.
The FCC is proposing to require KYC for anyone who uses a phone. We can act now to stop further erosion of our privacy.
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.
Stella is the companion app for Meta's smart glasses. Inspecting version 273.0.0.21 of the Android build (com.facebook.stella), I found the entire computational and storage stack for on-device facial recognition: three face models, a local database schema, a cosine-similarity vector index dimensioned to
