Topics /
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,063 posts.
As I’ve shared with family, friends and our team since late last year, I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research. The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on. And as of the last Ponzi cases we just completed and are sharing with regulators, that day is today.
Copyright maximalists just don’t know when to stop. Having failed in their 2020 attempt to use U.S. law to force GitHub to permanently cut off access to youtube-dl, an open source tool that allows users to download and preserve videos, on the theory that the tool can also be used for infringing...
I hope I don't get kicked out of Yale for this.
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
At the end of last week, the White House published a draft for a Source Code Policy (Update: the draft is not online anymore, link changed to final version). The policy requires every public agency to publish their custom-build software as Free Software for other public agencies as well as the ge...
When people call the US Supreme Court "corporate-friendly," it's often hard to know what that means in concrete terms. But here's an example of what it means when the highest court in the land is in the tank for big business.
In our recent 2020 in numbers blog post we predicted that we would reach 500k sound uploads at some point in 2021 and… it has just happened! At some point during the past weekend, the number of sounds which are available for download in Freesound has surpassed half a million. Note that by sounds which are available…
The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open (yes, there are tens of us!), expecting to get some work done before my attention fragments. But Google had other plans. They had rolled out a new version of Antigravity the day before, at I/O 2026 , presenting it as a shiny, standalone Codex-style experience.
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
Retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart has won a substantial settlement from the county and sheriff behind his arrest.
Way back in the 80s, some people had a dream of combining the cutesy graphics of 80s visual games and the soul-crushing difficulty of 80s text adventures. And so Sierra On-Line created quest games.
The event's Leave No Trace principle isn't just a promise — it's measured, mapped, and made public.
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from ordinary websites you visit. Any company that buys ads on ChatGPT installs
The Australian government has new laws on the books to hack your computer, your online accounts, and just about any piece of technology and networks you come into contact with. It can happen without a warrant and without you ever knowing. That’s just the start of it. Outraged? Good.
Everyone knows a horror story about PayPal, I’ve had several painful experiences with them over the last decade, but now I’ll never have to…
OR: why your brain needs a boxcutter
“We have enormous computing power in the US government, but we need to be able to bring it to bear without the phone killing itself.” – FBI Director James Comey, March 1 , 2016.
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
We are facing a full-scale assault on the First Amendment freedom of the press.
I’ve had Feeling Hard Or Hardly Feeling saved to my hard drive since 7-17-2005 without even knowing who made it. Just now bothered to find out.
Slack has finally decided to close down their IRC and XMPP gateways. True to form, you can only read their announcement if you already have a Slack account and…
Claude Free, Pro, and Max users can now opt in to having conversations used to improve models, with a five-year retention period for participants.
By Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all! On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. 1 They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These […]
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce the newest member of its Board of Directors: renowned security expert Bruce Schneier. Schneier is widely acclaimed for his criticism and commentary on everything from network security to national security. His insight...
