811
Buy Your Friends Batteries
Pool your money and give your friends batteries that lower their electricity bills and keep essential devices running during outages.
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
812
What the fuck happened to nerds
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
813
Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web…
814
The View from RSS
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
815
The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
“The dreamers look skyward with longing. The Internet hums with its usual promise — you will find your people, your myth, your wonder, and maybe your transformation.”
816
Apple, What Have You Done?
I've been an Apple user for over a decade and generally very happy with that life choice, but since iOS / iPadOS 26 and MacOS Tahoe were released a few month...
817
The Duty of a Scholar
There was a joke at the time that although the National Security Agency had opened up in recent years and started taking their defensive role more seriously, the one aspect of cryptography which they would never discuss publicly was side channel attacks — and this itself constituted a side channel, revealing the…
818
The Social Smolnet
The Social Smolnet par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
819
Canada
I've been visiting the US a lot these days: for work, for conferences, and simply to see friends. Commensurately, I've been also thinking more about what Can...
820
Codeberg Divides
Codeberg drew a democratic, but suboptimal line.
821
I'm tired of being on the network
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone
822
The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden
Swedish AI provider Berget AI releases an open-source method for calculating the carbon emissions of every individual AI request, developed with researchers from SEI, WattTime and Klimatkollen — and customers can now follow their emissions per request in the console.
823
Good people refuse to do bad things
On the responsibility of engineers
824
Image of our satellite-choked night skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. Thi
825
MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and…
826
How Quickly Can the DoD Rebuild and Recast the Munitions Industrial Base?
The U.S. munitions industrial base should be rebuilt and recast for modern wars of precision and attrition. What is a realistic timeline for this goal? By analyzing DOD budget documents and industry announcements, this analysis provides a clearer picture of the planned future.
827
Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change
1 in 4 American workers stay in their jobs because of the healthcare. It suppresses wages and working conditions - and prevents innovators from heading out on their own.
828
I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
I made 20 GDPR data deletion requests in the past year. 2 complied immediately. 6 complied after I filed complaints with data protection offices. 12 still haven't. The regulation exists, the enforcement doesn't.
829
The future of independence is interdependence
Every one of us depends on others; the only difference is how visible that dependence is.
830
Just Put It on a Map
An underrated strategy for urbanist persuasion, powered by open source tools
831
Bye Bye Gmail
TLDR: Please remove @gmail.com as my primary email address and substitute removed . I will try to respond to email sent to @gmail.com but no guarantees.
832
The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
An S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
833
The AI Great Leap Forward
In 1958, Mao ordered every village to produce steel. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Today's top-down AI mandates are producing the same pattern: ba...
834
Notes from the SF peptide scene
Pulling together disparate thoughts from two weeks wandering around SF
835
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
836
Treason in the Futures Markets
People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets
837
DHS Quits Granting Green Cards–Almost
This policy is illogical and will harm Americans, their employees, employers, and family members. It will drive talented people to other countries and make America a less competitive place for business.
838
How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
Public Health professor discusses how ultra-processed foods are a direct legacy of the tobacco industry, and are responsible for a dramatic rise in obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases across the country.
839
Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
840
Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
A solo developer watched his community lose a fight because they didn't have the right tools at the right time. So he started building.