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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
FDR has always been one of my favorite presidents, second maybe to Lincoln. Both were men the establishment assumed were one of them until, to their horror, they governed like they weren't. Both could trash the opposition in one breath and take the moral high ground in the next.
Iran is in the midst of one of the world’s most severe communications blackouts. This post uses Kentik data to detail how this historic event unfolded, where this event lies in the context of previous Iranian shutdowns, and finally discusses what might be in store next for Iran.
Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote job,...
I had a dream last night I went to work at Amazon. Joining the Bezos neofeudal empire. This post is directed at anyone with talent who works at a tech company ushering in this future.
Compared to their parents, Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids. The new American dad is more present and more exhausted—but also, more satisfied with life.
They are draining the economic potential of our cities. We need to make them financially unsustainable.
Somehow a film made 56 years ago named Colossus The Forbin Project predicted the world of today
A blog about software craft and quality
The Dimensionality Problem
The Soul of a Pedicab Driver, by Carl Etnier.
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons . Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War…
Nial – Knowledge work and artificial intelligence.
The DRUGS Act (‘Domain Reform for Unlawful Drug Sellers Act, H.R. 6352 & S.3399) is legislation that would rob you and millions of Americans of daily medications that keep them healthy and alive. Worse yet, the legislation is backed by Big Pharma front groups.
Journalists are thanking the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of news and history and for being an important resource for journalists. This letter is coming at a time where many major media outlets are questioning whether to allow the Wayback Machine to continue to preserve journalism.
In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and file formats form the foundations of a world in which choices remain open and power is not concentrated in the hands of a single player. We concluded with a question: if open…
Gland, Switzerland, 9 April 2026 (IUCN) – The emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal are now both Endangered, according to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™. Climate change in Antarctica is leading to changes in sea-ice that are projected to cause the emperor penguin population to halve by the 2080s, while…
Psiphon, a software company that helps internet users under oppressive regimes evade online censorship, plans to leave Canada if the lawful-access bill passes.
into the digital marketing agency that creates your music taste
I spent three days in San Marino, a landlocked microstate completely surrounded by Italy. The people of San Marino are called the “Sammarinese.”
Humans are the only primates with a population-wide hand preference. A new Oxford-led study, 'Bipedalism and brain expansion explain human handedness', published in PLOS Biology, traces it back to bipedalism and brain expansion.
How I stumbled across a fake booter site run by international police, and how they panicked when I started digging
This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager’s git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments.
Analysis of more than 40 million alarm-related events shows most alarms offer little operational value, disrupt rest and push crews toward risky workarounds.
As warmer temperatures return, Union Pacific is applying an innovative concept to manage heat-related track conditions – part of a broader strategy that helped the railroad deliver its best-ever full-year derailment incident rate in 2025, improving 19% year over year.
The coming proxy wars will be devastating for civilians and do little to improve governance and human welfare in Ethiopia and the wider Horn
How early-stage clinical trials became unnecessarily expensive and inefficient—and how we can fix them, inspired by a recent story about a dog treated for cancer.
And rightly so.
We are told that wealth is a measure of contribution. The richer a person becomes, the more they must have given to society. This is one of the founding myths of capitalism. It is repeated so often…
