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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978
The latest report in EPI’s annual series analyzing current and long-term trends in CEO compensation.
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Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
This is a furry blog, where I write about whatever interests me and sign it with my fursona’s name. I sometimes talk about furry fandom topics, but I sometimes also talk about applied cryptog…
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FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap
FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels highlights open source, European digital sovereignty, BSD, Linux, community innovation, and free software.
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The age of the grift shift
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]
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Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro
The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.
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Down the Rabbit Hole: The world of estranged parents' forums (2015)
This page doesn’t apply to all estranged parents, only to estranged parents who are members of estranged parents’ forums. Read why.
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The internet is no longer a safe haven
A couple of days ago, the small server hosting this website was temporarily knocked out by scraping …
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South Korea has limited a working week to 52 hours, in order to stop overwork
The previous limit was almost 10 hours every single day, including weekends.
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AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating
Everyone's using AI wrong. Its superpower isn't writing for you. It's reading everything you've ever written and finding patterns you missed.
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Is Clear Air Turbulence becoming more common?
In recent years there has been a noticeable uptick in publicized incidents of turbulence affecting commercial aircraft. These events, sometimes unexpected and severe, have led to passenger injuries, emergency landings, and a recent rare fatality. Turbulence can be caused by a variety of factors, from the mixing of air…
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Is Hacker News Bullshit?
The future of online media
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All the oxygen trapped in a bubble
There are many good reasons to be concerned about whether the internet industry is in another bubble. Once shaky, unproven businesses hit the NASDAQ, the chance that granny is going to lose her pension fund goes up big time. That’s the direct economic consequence that you’ve probably heard already.…
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The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
“Prince is synonymous with indulging in yourself shamelessly and with passion. His music and his cultural impact mean more than words can offer.” “He taught me that being black wa…
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Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good
Google search is in the news. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google search is a monopoly and is behaving in a manner that suppresses search competition with their distribution agreements. The debate on this has started,...
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The EU's Copyright Proposal Is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even Wikipedia
The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they...
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Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment
Defenders of the NSA's mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. That argument has always been dubious for a number of...
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How I helped fix Canadaʼs Covid Alert app
On July 31st , Canada’s COVID Alert app was made available for general use, though it does not have support for actually reporting a diagnosis in most provinces, yet.
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How good are American roads?
We’re in an era where US infrastructure is getting a lot of attention.
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Mastodon is doomed?
Mastodon won't be the next Twitter, and it's not because of Bluesky. The ideals and execution won't scale.
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How to summon and sell your soul to Satan and other devils
Selling your soul has never been easier. Today, there are plenty of demonology books that teach you how to bargain with Lucifer, written by authors who have probably done this themselves on multiple occasions.
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The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
Update: I originally quoted the average price of office space as $36 / square foot / month, where ...
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Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?
I’m not saying this will definitely happen, but I think we could be on the cusp of a significant shift in Windows market share for consumer computers. It is not going to drop to 2% in a year or anything, but I feel like a few pieces are coming
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"Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit
I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI):
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Google faces first investigation by its European lead authority over GDPR
Today, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced a major GDPR probe into “suspected infringement” by Google’s DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers advertising business. The probe was triggered by a formal complaint from Dr Johnny Ryan, Chief Policy Officer at Brave, the private web browser.
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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser
Longtime Readers of this blog will be aware that I have been a fan of Mozilla for a long time. There’s nearly ten years of Mozilla advocacy tucked away in the JWM archives. I’ve been on the Mozilla fanboy train since before Firefox even existed — all the way back to the original Mozilla Suite’s Milestone 17 release…