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London's Free Roof Terraces
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
362
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
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Jobs and Software Is Fucked
Or how I decided to scream into the void about how awful the job market is. I'm still in a very sour mood after the latest rounds of interviews but ultimatel...
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The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
2.8k words, 13 minutes reading time
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The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I've watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I've watched the show…
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That's not how email works
A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that…
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Stop Ruining It
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…
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The Great Unwind
The economy is crashing because Wall Street spent trillions shorting Japan's currency and now they're being squeezed.
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Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see
How mindless consumption is making our FYPs worse.
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Can you see three trees?
There's a simple three-part test for whether your city has enough nature. Most fall short.
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LinkedIn Larpmaxxing
rant and building of the slop YOLO project to detect other slop YOLO projects
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Software Pump and Dump
A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
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The Religion of Speed
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
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221 Cannon is Not For Sale
Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life. It’s annoying, but thankfully I’ve avoided some of the more catastrophic outcomes when criminals begin impe…
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All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)
When OpenAI released the first version of Sora, I was excited. For years, I'd had this short story sitting on my hard drive, something I'd written long ago and always dreamed of bringing to life as a
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EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application
Under the new rules, businesses must prioritise keeping products in use by selling them or preparing them for reuse.
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A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention
Last week, the government announced that Canada has signed the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, with Ministers Anita Anand, Gary Anandasangaree and Sean Fraser touting the treaty’s child protection provisions and human rights safeguards, which were described as “among the strongest found in an…
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Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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Why jet engines aren't made in China
What China’s jet engine program tells us about the limits of industrial policy
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Use protocols, not services
The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy-preserving by design. I mean, unless some administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built-in...
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Countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance the best
USA and their friends in the surveillance alliance Fourteen Eyes have demonstrated that they have the capacity, the desire and the experience to monitor who they want, when they want, anywhere in the world.
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Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
In 51,129 comments from six knife subreddits, the 5% most brand-heavy accounts wrote 11.3% of the brand mentions in buying threads, against 7.9% expected by chance. For one brand it is 31% against 8%. The full Reddit histories of those accounts are 4.5 years old and spread over 66 subreddits, the same as a comparison…
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We have a year to fix security everywhere
consumer-grade hardware can run an LLM that hacks the planet. we can stop it, but we don't have much time.
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ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree
We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an…
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A simple web we own
Today, the Web and Internet are owned and controlled by large for-profit corporations and a few governments 1 . Corporate ownership combined with government policies has left us as tenant and product. It has given us a surveillance economy and enshittification 2 .
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I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
A brief explanation of my pessimism about efforts to radically improve education.
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America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks
Saving regret has less to do with procrastination than we thought, and more to do with whether your country absorbs economic shocks or lets them hit your savings