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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
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I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
Many ads in Apple News served by Taboola are clearly scams.
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Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
Anthropic's response to the Secretary of War and advice for customers
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The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
Americans, be warned: Age verification is identity verification.
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Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
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Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE
The undersigned NGOs condemn Meta’s decision to restrict the Facebook and Instagram accounts of independent NGOs, researchers, and civil society figures from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
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Keep Our Servers Running
“Universal access to all human knowledge is within our grasp. Our job is to put the best our world has to offer within the reach of our children.” —Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive Digital Librarian Every time you search the Wayback Machine or explore a collection at the Internet Archive, you are accessing a global…
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A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
Why is the military and a cheese fortune teller contacting me about SondeHub.org
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Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
DAWO.community, working together on a digitally autonomous workplace for the Dutch government.
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Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
Lots of US states, European countries, and Australia have introduced "age verification" regulations. They present it as the classic "save the children" talking ...
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“This is not the computer for you”
There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.
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Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain
The decades-long battle over lawful access entered a new phase yesterday with the introduction of Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act. This bill follows the attempt last spring to bury lawful access provisions in Bill C-2, a border measures bill that was the new government’s first piece of substantive legislation. The…
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I'm OK being left behind, thanks
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre…
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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.
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Do dentists know what they're doing?
After all, they’re just practicing
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I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
Identity verification and age verification is an increasinly common policy conversation at the moment, in numerous countries.
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25 years of mass surveillance is enough
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the…
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Virginia bans sale of precise geolocation data
On April 13, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed into law S.B. 338 , which amends the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (“VCDPA”) to prohibit the sale of geolocation data. Notably, the VCDPA defines “sale” more narrowly than other state comprehensive privacy laws, as “the exchange of personal data…
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What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance
The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:
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“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
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Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state
Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
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GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers
GPTZero's analysis 4841 papers accepted by NeurIPS 2025 show there are at least 100 with confirmed hallucinations
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Pollen tried to remove my article and Google is assisting with it
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
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Your ePub Is fine
Adobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives,...
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I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
What happens when you responsibly disclose a critical vulnerability exposing personal data - including that of minors - and the organization responds with legal threats instead of a thank you?
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Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained
What is the difference between Chat Control 1.0 and Chat Control 2.0? A clear overview of both EU laws, their timelines, and where things stand today.
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Migrating to the EU
For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…
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Why Japanese companies do so many different things
The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations
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We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.