3961
The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off
Let's address the mammoth in the room: the fediverse , the network of mastodon servers, is very inefficient.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
3962
Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk
In "Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation," a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:
3963
We’ve built a towering pile of shite
This a rant, written at midnight, after battling software errors. Set your profanity filters accordingly. I despair over the state of software engineering - specifically, stability. We seem to have lost the understanding that computers are there to do the hard work for us. And I don't think we ever believed in a…
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No Bitcoin-based protocol can handle more than 20M users per month
To solve Bitcoin’s scalability challenge, many so-called layer 2 protocols have been proposed. All of these protocols operate on the same, relatively simple, principle:
3966
I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals
We reviewed 22 ML conference submissions this summer. Fifteen had fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, or clear LLM slop, so we complain about that a bit, and release the paper references audit we now run.
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Google’s new Chat service shows contempt for Android users’ privacy
Google launches Chat - new messaging service for Android phones
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Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred…
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The Dutch government wants automatic permission to target victims of hackers
This is a mirror of the original about:intel post, since the about:intel server is sadly sometimes overloaded. Also do read the opposing view from Jan-Jaap Oerlemans and the reflection by Lotte Houwing The Dutch government is proposing adding a lex specialis to its existing intelligence and security services act. This…
3972
An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress
Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively. We, the undersigned, have played...
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/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification
The moment /r/antiwork died was tailor-made for infamy. Head moderator Doreen Ford went on with Fox host Jesse Watters for an interview…
3975
How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising
Gerrymandering distorts the will of the people, but the basic math of geographic representation makes it difficult to get rid of, unless we get rid of representation for geographic districts.
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How much of HN is AI?
TL;DR: 62% as of September 2026. This is up from ~40% in February.
3977
We've Built Cities We Can't Afford
Kansas City, Missouri, has a serious infrastructure problem. But an emerging conversation is charting a path toward greater strength and financial resilience.
3978
So thieves broke into your storage unit again
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story. All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by ...
3979
Note from Mark Zuckerberg
Everything we do at Facebook is focused on our mission to make the world more open and connected.
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We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future
UPDATE: This is now the topic of my South by Southwest proposal. Please go vote for and comment on it here. We're not going to have a jobless recovery....
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Lie still in bed
One of the most impactful pieces of advice I ever got was just to lie still in bed.
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If you think psychological science is bad, imagine how bad it was in 1999
Shane Frederick points us to this article from 1999 , “Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance,” about which he writes:
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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
About a year ago I wrote on this blog about how coding with LLMs would not work for me, even if there were no ethical or environmental concerns preventing me to use them. I'm not going to repeat the…
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Norwegian frigate sinking has far-reaching implications
In an incident that has attracted relatively little media attention in Australia, the modern 5,300-ton Norwegian frigate KNM Helge Ingstad sank in a Norwegian fjord after a collision with the large Maltese-registered oil tanker Sola ...
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Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx
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Air Accident Investigation Branch: film lights caused window damage on A321neo
The UK AAIB says high-powered film lights caused damaged to the windows of the Titan Airways A321neo G-OATW.
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New Defaults
The pandemic and vaccine rollout have highlighted where the West has lost its way; we need new defaults about information, change, and speed.
3989
Goodbye Mac App Store
While Jettison and HistoryHound are still supported and sold on the St. Clair Software website, I’ve pulled them from the Mac App Store. The versions that were in the Mac App Store were older revisions, and it just didn’t make business sense to rearchitect the apps to meet Apple’s current requirements for approval so…
3990
Steelmanning: Discover the truth by helping your opponent
Tackle the steelmanning challenge, a three-step method to win arguments by helping your opponent. Its only downside: Nobody will ever take it.