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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
Can you trust your computer? Can you control what it does and doesn’t? Or is someone else in control? How can you even know what it is or isn’t doing? Even if it tells you, how do you know it’s not lying? As computing systems become more complex, how can “Trusted Computing” be achieved, not (just) by big corporations…
It’s been a while since we posted one of our articles pulling back the curtains on archival work. To make up for that, here’s a special edition of our popular Archives FAQs and Facts series. For th…
As someone who's uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to the Internet Archive's stacks and who has probably done a few million transactions with the materials over the years, I just "know" about the Internet Archive python client, and if you're someone who wants to interact with the site as a power user (or were
And What is Says About the Institutional Problems in American Cities & Infrastructure
My opinions on Web3 and why it is flawed
The other day, my twelve-year-old daughter asked me what platform I spend most of my time on when I'm on my phone or computer. She intuitively noticed that ...
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
Most guys my age have "the chat". The one with your college buddies that only exists to share memes, argue, bully, and occasionally announce that you got a promotion or had a kid. I am like most guys.
Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
I recently read End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. It's an excellent book and I highly recommend that everyone read it. Tech oligarchs make up an important component of the end-times-fascist coalition. One thing that stood out
Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on…
New information coming to light in Amazon and meat price-fixing antitrust cases shows inflation is probably being driven by consolidation in the form of data sharing.
We recently ordered a high-value item from Amazon (for Prime delivery), but it was stolen from within their delivery chain. Amazon initially accepted that there was an issue but have staunchly tried t
The dreams of a forgotten movement from the 1930s live on
Germany's far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party has confirmed that it has suffered a security breach, after a hacker published what appear to be hundreds of thousands of the controversial political party's internal emails.
As I was walking around Osaka with Sacha , we started talking about Hacker News and how there seem to be a lot of popular stories about Japan.
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish…
