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Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
662
The Hierarchy of Money
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
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Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project
OSM US is incredibly excited to announce the latest Charter Project: OldInsuranceMaps.net (OIM)!If you’re a map nerd you’ll remember ever seeing a Sanborn Insurance Map in person. They often come in absolute...
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Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets
How wind and solar quietly pushed gas off the margin, and the wholesale price followed.
665
I think I hate the internet
I’ve just finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and was equally parts shocked and unsurprised by the events she witnessed at Facebook / Met...
666
Helsinki Hacker News Meetup
A casual, roughly bimonthly Sunday coffee meetup for Hacker News posters in Helsinki. Open to anyone with 64+ HN karma.
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Rsync and outrage
I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…
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America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital
$6 trillion in patient capital, $60+ billion in annual fees, and the infrastructure that never gets built
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AI and the Ship of Theseus
Slopforks: what happens when a library gets rewritten with AI?
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Looks like it is happening
Update: Sorry, but a commenter points out that this may just be an artifact of counting based on when most recently modified, not on original submission date. Numbers using original, not most recen…
672
Hacker News, Sans AI
I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on __AI__. Refreshes about every ten minutes.
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Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
Anthropologist Roberto González (Professor, San José State University) examines how America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Although much of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on conventional weapons systems, the Defense Department has increasingly…
675
C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality
You might have heard that C2PA is a technology that will miraculously save us from rampant AI forgeries, by having cameras cryptographically sign the images they capture. Hooray for cryptography !
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I'm the AGI that's wiping out humanity
Alex Moon is an Australian-British software engineer and artist based in the North East of England.
677
A directory of people who love RSS
Today, I launched I ♥ RSS, a directory for people who love RSS. I've already added the badge to my footer and submitted my site to the directory. It also shows a nice live blogroll on the homepage (powered by FeedLand). If you love RSS as much as I do, take a look and add …
678
120 days until Google restricts side-loading, declaring war on Android freedom
Starting 2027, Google will block apps on Android devices whose developers have not registered with Google, paid, and given their ID. It’s fair to say that Google is becoming Apple: Your device, their rules.
679
The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
Discover how communication patterns shape team performance, innovation, and collective intelligence. Learn why idea flow matters more than talent alone.
680
I was right about ATProto key management
Note: this post has been revised to be split into two sections: a description of what happened, and my analysis. I hope to make it clear that, while I do not like ATProto in general, I am trying to make good-faith critcisms of specific design decisions and outcomes, and in fact, this post getting updoots on HackerNews…
681
Brown student maps the hidden global labor powering AI
Cunyan Ma’s interactive tool exposes the power structure that extracts low-wage labor from data workers in the Global South to make everyday AI algorithms function.
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9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
More than 93,000 visible appearances of brands promoting unhealthy food and drink, alcohol, gambling and speculative products were recorded during coverage of the largest FIFA World Cup in history, new research has found. Unhealthy food and drink brands accounted for more than seven in ten, with 65,722 appearances.
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Bombarding gamblers with offers greatly increases betting and gambling harm
Research has confirmed for the first time that people with active gambling accounts who receive regular ‘free bets’ and other direct marketing offers place a lot more bets, spend far more, and suffer greater related harms than gamblers who have opted out of such offers.
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Aligned to whom?
You are relying very heavily on the priors of the model to do a good job for you. What happens when you cannot judge whether those priors are good?
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Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
What statistics can teach us about observing 3 deaths at Burning Man in 2026.
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In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
In an easterly suburb of Mykolaiv, drinking water flowed from kitchen taps, as it has since last year thanks to a small off-grid solar field tucked inconspicuously into its midst. Paul Hockenos reports.
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Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand
Political bias in AI measures where every major AI model stands on charged political and ethical questions: run many times, no web search, plotted with error...
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The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral. Except if we look…