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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right…
A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it
AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!
OR: an apology to my English teachers
Read about the hidden divide between self-inflicted irrelevance and real engineering leverage.
Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns
Liberty has costs, but it's worth it.
Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team eventually rotated out, even the core strategy was…
We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America. The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975
Age verification turns the open internet into a permission system and pushes control away from families, schools, and users.
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.
The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit
It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.
AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to...
After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few homes. From 2010 to 2019, rents in Austin increased nearly 93%—more than in any other major American city. And home sale…
In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 73, the state’s draconian anti-VPN age verification law. The decision comes as EFF submitted our comments to the Utah Department of Commerce, detailing how forcing platforms to detect and block privacy-preserving tools…
Xe Iaso's personal website.
In the context of concerns around young people’s interactions with digital technologies, the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is consulting on additional measures to prepare young people for ...
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
If you’re willing to use AI-generated images, how do I know the text isn’t AI-generated?
The EU's new mandatory ADDW rules could make roads safer by altering distracted drivers, but its privacy safeguards and data handling rules remain a gray area.
An experiment in language change
The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open (yes, there are tens of us!), expecting to get some work done before my attention fragments. But Google had other plans. They had rolled out a new version of Antigravity the day before, at I/O 2026 , presenting it as a shiny, standalone Codex-style experience.
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
Retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart has won a substantial settlement from the county and sheriff behind his arrest.
The event's Leave No Trace principle isn't just a promise — it's measured, mapped, and made public.
OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com. The value is while you are on ChatGPT and tied to your ChatGPT account. __obi is then sent to OpenAI from ordinary websites you visit. Any company that buys ads on ChatGPT installs
