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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
[A Federal Air Marshal (FAM) tasked with surveillance of an airline passenger targeted by Quiet Skies lists and/or rules followed the traveler out to the curb and recorded the license plate number of the vehicle in which she left the airport, so that her airline reservations could be integrated with license plate…
Among adults who have not paid for news in the past year, the most common reason they cite is that they can find plenty of other news articles for free.
The Free Software Foundation Europe deleted its account on X. The platform never aligned with our values and no longer serves as a space for communication....
A call to reject the deployment and use of AI systems in Canada's public sector.
HS2 has become a case study in how not to build infrastructure. But what if we’d taken a different path entirely? In this post, I imagine how the Swiss would have done it: starting with the timetable, not the project. It’s a counterfactual, but it’s not a fantasy.
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco
In their own words, we see that Snap Inc’s design choices expose millions of kids to harm
The candid naivety of geeks par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
[X-posted from the Live Near Friends blog]
O bviously there have been many editorial changes at the formerly venerable Washington Post, a tawdry saga which I don’t intend to recap here.
Windows 10 spies on your use of System Settings
Why the banks really hate fintechs that allow businesses to learn your account number easily.
I have used it for a long time - 20 years now, including for a while the IceWeasel variant - and I like it as a browser.
The Authority found the App Tracking Transparency (“ATT”) policy to restrict competition The policy lays down the privacy rules imposed by the company on third-party developers of apps off...
Private practices are vanishing as more doctors join large hospital systems. This increasing consolidation is reducing competition and raising prices, according to a study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Fiona Scott Morton.
When Large Language Models are used as judges for decision-making across various sensitive domains, they consistently exhibit unpredictable and hidden measurement biases, making their verdicts unreliable despite common prompt engineering practices.
A reflection on affordability, finance, and the deep contradictions we struggle to face.
Mag World: an intuitive sense of scale, using orders of magnitude
Last week, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman announced in San Francisco that the World project he co-founded, formerly known as Worldcoin, is opening six stores across the United States, allowing users of the project's app to scan their eyeballs. This is worrisome, to say the least.
Even if we manage to snap out of the AI bubble, we are never going to get these years back. I can only be left to wonder what could have been.
Are speed dating and network effects contradictory?
We've opposed the Take It Down Act because it could be easily manipulated to take down lawful content that powerful people simply don't like. Last night, President Trump demonstrated he has a similar view on the bill. He wants to sign the bill into law, then use it to remove content about — him....
Major digital labor platforms, also known as gig companies, operating in the United States misclassify gig workers as independent contractors, denying them labor rights.
For other news from February, see my previous grapevine. This report is available free to the public. If you like my writings on genre issues, consider backing my Patreon.
The US energy secretary says the quiet part out loud: the tributary $750 billion in energy purchases the EU has promised in its Trump deal is meant to lock Europe into "long-term" energy dependence.
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