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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,046 posts.
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NYT and vaping: How to lie by saying only true things (2022)
An exercise in spotting agenda journalism: dissecting a 2022 𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝑌𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 article on teen vaping sentence by sentence to show how it pins an EVALI hospitalization on legal nicotine vapes while never quite saying so—since the actual cause was illegal THC products. Every misleading sentence is technically true.
903
War Crimes Seem to Be Official US Policy Now
We Will Rue The Day
904
The U.S. Census Bureau and "Super Intelligence"
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in …
905
Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries
For over a century, fixed prices have made markets more transparent. Surveillance pricing threatens to reverse that progress by allowing corporations to secretly tailor prices using personal data.
906
Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
Every productivity wave since the PC made work faster and piled on more of it, so companies gained more than workers did. AI does the work itself, which is why this one could land differently.
907
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Confessions of a naive hamster: why the smartest people in the room keep missing that intelligence is often not the main bottleneck in the real world
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Cyberdecks, going analog, and convivial technology
People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.
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UBI as a productivity dividend
Why Universal Basic Income (UBI) Is the Only Way to Share AI and Productivity Gains With Everyone
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Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based, managerial, or administrative...
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The Car That Watches You Back: The Advertising Infrastructure of Modern Cars
How the connected car became an advertising surface. From Stellantis startup pop-ups to GSTV pumps to Gulp Radio aisles, and the consent infrastructure the automobile never developed.
912
Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web
A Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages from a decade ago, and about 25% of pages sampled across the decade, are now inaccessible; our analysis shows that the Wayback Machine has rescued roughly 15% of those otherwise dead pages.
913
Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New
In 1980, Negativland released its first self-titled album with handmade covers and distributed it through a few record stores in the California Bay Area. “We thought we might sell 100 in the next five years, and we sold all 500 in three months. So we kept going,” said band co-founder Mark Hosler of the experimental
914
The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game
Raffael Hickisch spent years dreaming up conservation tools he couldn't afford to build. Then he built them himself, with an AI agent and a country's worth of public data.
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Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas
OpenAI sent Governor Greg Abbott a letter outlining its commitment to responsible AI infrastructure in Texas. The letter supports reliable, transparent growth that benefits Texans.
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The AI Hate Progression
I think I've spoken at length in other places about how I am a very staunch AI hater and covered everything I hate about how the tech is pre...
917
Self hosted email continues to steeply decline
Ten years of DNS measurements reveal three trends across the Internet's most popular domains: email continues to consolidate around two providers, DMARC enforcement has hit a plateau, and a surprisingly large long tail of infrastructure defies easy classification.
918
We are going to kill "unalive"
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
919
What we lost the last time code got cheap
The outsourcing era showed that making code cheaper moves the real cost from production to comprehension. AI-generated code makes that problem more acute. ...
920
Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance
Researcher Matthew Nock pioneered the technique of using smartphone technology to survey high-risk adults and adolescents in real time. In a new study, Nock and his team report using the technology to predict 75 percent of suicide attempts in the week before they occurred.
921
AI was great until it was not
A cautionary tale.
922
Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada
Radio Amateurs du Canada réagit à la fermeture du service Radio-Météo au Canada For immediate release | February 25, 2026Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC) is saddened to learn about the closure of the Weatheradio service provided by Environment and Climate Change Canada.For decades, Weatheradio has been a trusted and…
923
AI is an elite crime spree
Documents show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history.” New AI regulations are besides the point, the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful.
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So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂
You face certain challenges
925
An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord
We’re launching a revamped, privacy-focused age assurance solution including methods that won’t require an ID or selfie. Here’s how it works.
926
The AI industry is pouring millions into US elections
Plus: Fiery resistance to a nuclear AI data center and A24's Google debacle. Welcome to the first episode of BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: THE SHOW, with the great AI and crypto watchdog, Molly White.
927
A desire for a loud car correlates with higher scores on psychopathy and sadism
Background: Although people are familiar with loud automobiles, equipped with modified mufflers to increase the volume, it is unclear who is most attracted to these vehicles. Participants and procedure: A sample of 529 (52% men) undergraduate business students were surveyed and were asked if...
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24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it
I found a one-line JavaScript bug in the 24 Hour Fitness unsubscribe page and built a working alternative. The official page has since been fixed.
929
The circus freaks of open source
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev circles, of being self-hosted. 1 TempleOS…
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Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
Summary: Air conditioning is not a luxury but a life-saving technology that has dramatically reduced heat-related deaths. Yet as heat waves kill tens of thousands of Europeans each year, many governments across the continent continue to discourage AC through permits, noise ordinances, and sometimes outright bans…