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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
On December 24th, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the US power company AES Corporation, submitted a project for a massive industrial complex for environmental impact assessment. This complex threatens the pristine skies above ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the darkest and clearest of any astronomical…
AI Chatbots, Newark, and the West Village Girls
beyond the green owl, from streaks and potions to pedagogy and politics
It would give the powerful a dangerous new route to manipulate platforms into removing lawful speech that they simply don't like, with President Trump himself saying that he would use the law to censor his critics. The bill passed the Senate in February, and it now heads to the president's desk.
This week's bankruptcy of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum, is about more than a robot cleaner. It's about monopolies, Wall Street, and economists leading America on a path of destruction.
Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take
In 2018, the Supreme Court repealed a 26-year federal ban on sports betting. This ruling unleashed the biggest gambling boom in America’s 249-year history. How did that happen?
Every time that I read some blog post about “coding with AI”, or how cool new models write entire libraries by themselves, I feel like I’m lagging behind, like I’m missing out on some big, useful tool, and my skills are about to become obsolete very soon.
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We are building a comprehensive archive and analysis project examining published documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Our methodology involves systematically reviewing each available document with particular attention to small details and information that has received little or no public attention since the initial…
The end of an era.
A document format is a tool for sharing knowledge and, as such, should be as simple and accessible as possible in relation to the complexity of the document content itself. This remains true even when the format is based on an XML schema that is hidden from users when the document is displayed on screen…
The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…
It is with heavy hearts that we report that Dave Täht has passed away.
Why being popular is not the goal of most small businesses
A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a
If the economy's single pillar goes down, Trump's presidency will be seen as a disaster.
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
I grew up on a farm outside of a rural town about an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. Like many small towns in America, my town knows “brain drain” – all of my friends from high school who went to college (~30% of my class) now live elsewhere, although most are pretty close by (e.g., several live in the suburbs of…
To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport.
A new take on Trump’s tariffs, including using a disruption lens to understand the U.S.’s manufacturing problem, and why a better plan would leverage demand, not kill it.
In January, Distributed Denial of Secrets published over 200 gigabytes of chat logs and recordings from paramilitary groups and militias, including American Patriots Three Percent (APIIII) and the Oath Keepers. The files were obtained by John Williams, a wilderness survival trainer who spent years deep undercover…
Consider just saying what the problem is
We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology . To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the…
The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python …
