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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 952 posts.
Short article slash rant discussing the Got it! button in a prompt for personalized Web experience in Microsoft Edge, covering user experience interruption, bad design, aggressive marketing, implicit decisions, other annoyances, and more
On the surface Seymour Hersh's story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.
The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself, and it's mostly not Biden's doing.
On January 15, the Dutch government was forced to resign amidst a scandal around its child-care benefits scheme. Systems that were meant to detect misuse of the benefits scheme, mistakenly labelled over 20,000 parents as fraudsters. More crucially, a disproportionate amount of those labelled as fraudsters had an…
An Air India flight from New Delhi to San Francisco diverted to Russia after experiencing problems with one of its engines.
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server
Don't suffer and merely survive, aided by your noise cancelling headphones. Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together.
In recent years, research showed that many professionals consider their work to be socially useless. Various explanations have been proposed for the phenomenon. The much-discussed “bullshit jobs theory” by the American anthropologist David Graeber, for example, states that some jobs are objectively useless and that…
The rise of powerful AI dialogue systems in recent months has precipitated debates about AI risks of all kinds, which hopefully will yield an acceleration of governance and regulatory frameworks.
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer…
We enable the world to secure the web. Burp Suite, the Web Security Academy, and world-leading research from PortSwigger — the AppSec community’s home.
"In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of [running] a business." -- George McGovern
A chilly recipe for boredom
Drugs cause addiction*. It is a rhetoric deeply ingrained into the American psyche based on a series of rat experimentations that placed one rat alone in a cage with two water bottles--one containing cocaine or heroin, the other just water. The rat chose the cocaine- or heroin-laced water every time until it died. The…
When BU’s Fallou Ngom found a note written by his late father, in a language that looked like Arabic but sounded like Wolof, it opened the door to a lifetime of discovery in African language and history.
OR: How to eat fewer asparagus beetles
Stephen Wolfram explores some of the science, technology and philosophy of what we can expect from AIs. From how ChatGPT works to the cycle of technology, to the concept of progress and preparing for an AI world.
PepsiCo employee says the Tesla Semi is a "disaster" & does 400 miles "at best" with round-the-clock servicing by Tesla engineers
The current Threads experience
I am currently affected by the wave of layoffs in the technology industry and this isn’t my first rodeo. The difference is that it feels worse this time as I am not only annoyed by losing my job, but I am starting to feel that the system is incredibly flawed. Instead of building a sustainable work environment with…
Elon Musk, X and the end of tweeted articles
These are posters warning of potential hazards on the railway. They were used for public relation relations at various stations to alert passengers and the gene
"Infosec Twitter," a vibrant community of security practitioners, known for its insight, inspiration, and entertainment, is coming to an end.
It's time to be honest about Musk's vacuum tube to nowhere
When discussing advanced AI, sometimes the following exchanges happens: “Perhaps advanced AI won’t kill us. Perhaps it will trade with us” “We don’t trade with ants” I think it’s interesting to get clear on exactly why we don’t trade with ants, and whether it is relevant to the AI situation. When a person says “we…
