601
I’m Terrified of My New TV
From facial recognition to personal data collection, this thing is downright scary -- and so are the implications.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,063 posts.
602
“Google: it is time to return to not being evil”
A monopoly both in search and advertising, Google, unfortunately, shows that they are not able to resist the misuse of power.
603
The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem
How I temporarily cut my mom out of my social media life to reach a larger audience.
604
The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
"We have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it." The FTC and states are going after Amazon, largely for stopping merchants from offering discounts elsewhere.
605
606
Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold.
607
Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn
Ruminations on outsourcing our values
608
A Decade-Old Gag Order, Lifted
More than a decade ago, a man named Nick Merrill approached the NYCLU and ACLU with an unusual request for help. At the time, Nick ran a small Internet access and consulting business, called Calyx, in New York City.
609
Apple’s ad business set to boom on the back of its own anti-tracking crackdown
Apple is the one tech giant that has never been associated with ads, proudly declaring its customer a jewel it will never sell to advertisers. But it seems that Apple is now immersing itself deep into the ad business. Will its promises be kept?
610
Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act
Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the dangerous EARN IT bill. We’re disappointed to see the committee advance this misguided bill. If enacted, EARN IT will put massive legal pressure on internet companies both large and small to stop using encryption and instead scan...
611
PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program
In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive…
612
I Want You to Understand Chicago
Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his…
613
Give Firefox a chance
We live in the era of browser monopoly. Google occupied the whole web by its Chrome. Chrome has more...
614
Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn't What It Used to Be
Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of...
615
Tarkovsky's films online for free
Mosfilm, one of the largest film studios in the USSR during the Soviet era, has put full-length versions of many of its most acclaimed and influential films on
616
Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"
If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk’s stance before providing you with an answer. …
617
Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
In my writing on technology and culture I try to be judicious about citing scientific studies. The issues involved in our ongoing wrangling with digital ... Read more
618
Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?
Investigating the seahorse emoji doom loop using logitlens.
619
620
HN comments are underrated
HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously…
621
622
623
Willingham sends Fables into the public domain
Here, below, is the press release I sent out today to explain what I did and why.
624
There is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format.
Also see Xiph.Org's new video, Digital Show & Tell , for detailed demonstrations of digital sampling in action on real equipment!
625
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
626
New German law would force ISPs to allow secret service to install trojans
A new law being proposed in Germany would see all 19 federal state intelligence agencies in Germany granted the power to spy on German citizens through
627
628
629
What happened to the Snowden archive
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it…
630
Most arguments are about ego, not ideas
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed…