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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
At this summer's HOPE conference, Joshua Aaron spoke about ICEBlock, his iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5 mile radius, and to get notifications when others report ICE sightings near them. You can see the full talk, and the lively/infuriating Q&A,
The Baumol Effect and Jevons paradox are related
It all started with a sarcastic jab in a chat: “You shouldn’t be more Catholic than the Pope. You go to order a coffee, and the guy’s like, ‘From Kenyan farms or Brazil?’ It’s l...
This is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk by Devine on November 26th 2022. Watch the video version on (YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie .
The largely overlooked privacy risks of using AI apps that not only remember your conversations, but are capable of using these to reveal your deepest secrets to others
I rented a car from Turo this weekend and it might as well have exploded...
An MIT-led study confirms the Antarctic ozone layer is healing as a direct result of global efforts to reduce ozone-depleting substances.
A bill headed to the Senate floor in Utah would require officers to disclose if a police report was written by generative AI. The bill, S.B. 180, requires a department to have a policy governing the use of AI. This policy would mandate that police reports created in whole or in part by generative...
Houston and Dallas reduced street homelessness dramatically not by being more compassionate or cruel than California, but by building working systems
Kids were not meant to be brought up in the digital world that exists today as it is incompatible with human neurological development.
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Here’s a Mastodon thread from a year ago. Just a quick check on how ChatGPT’s getting on … Me: Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when? ChatGPT…
I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence. It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.
The Matrix Conference 2025 was a huge success, and the energy and enthusiasm was just incredible!
Designer and educator Angie Wang deciphers a collection of over 500 sleeves recently donated to the Archive.
November seems to be a ripe month for challenges. Some people grow facial hair. Some people write many words daily hoping to come out with a novel on the other...
As of 2023, the US has around 142.3 million housing units: roughly one home for every 2.4 people in the country.
Americans are having a record low amount of sex, especially young adults.
The Unreliability of LLMs & What Lies Ahead
The gaps scammers exploit in gift cards are the result of deliberate policy tradeoffs.
Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publis...
Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story
The EESC has adopted an opinion pointing out that nuclear energy is an essential component of the clean energy mix which is needed to phase out fossil fuels. The Committee calls on the European Commission to include key regulatory and financial enablers in order to make the planned investment possible, and to enhance…
The personal blog of Thomas Steiner
When you paste ChatGPT’s response instead of your own feedback, you’re not being helpful. You’re being lazy and creating more work for everyone.
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
WTF moment: Why my native OS refuses to return a "True" value.
MotionLab.Berlin is the new operator of Europe’s largest makerspace, which is being built on the ringberlin model campus in Mariendorf.
For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the co…
The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging…
