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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise. No one on earth—certainly no one who reads t…
I spent almost three weeks in Tunisia, visiting the cities of Tunis, Bizerte, El Kef, Tozeur, Tataouine, El Jem, Sfax, Sousse, Monastir, Kairouan, and a few smaller towns in between. At first, I th…
What if something can't be found through Google Search? Does it still exist? That question I have to ask myself when I found that a blogpost...
Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't publish it 2 years ago.
Social media giants have bought our government, and are trying to bully Europe
UPDATE: I submitted a more formal version of this article to the UMAP Journal (Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications), which publishes articles that use mathematical modeling for real-world problems, often with a pedagogical or expository angle. A preprint is available on arXiv at…
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/
With Trump’s return and the CLOUD Act, U.S. access to European data is a growing risk. Discover why open-source solutions and a solid cloud infrastructure are the only way forward to digital sovereignty.
JavaScript, math, maps, etc
Fake agencies mentioned in this post: The Elite Scout SocietyImplicitPress Literary AgencyJudith Carter LiteraryLiterary Agents AssociationMushens & Churchill Literary AgencyStory Arc Literary GroupsZenith Literary Not too long ago, I published a post with tips and techniques to help writers spot a fake literary…
AI is writing 90% of the code I was in charge of
A while back we watched a video on the topic of British road crossings (which I strongly recommend, as well as Chris's shorter video specifically about Zebra crossings ) and since then Tess has been calling out the different crossings by their proper animal names. This explains why, with tickets to a Halloween event…
States need to have and use data privacy laws to bring privacy violations to light and hold companies accountable for them. So, we were glad to see that the Texas Attorney General’s Office has filed its first lawsuit under Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA) to take the Allstate Corporation...
Swiss cheese gets holes from carbon dioxide bubbles during the cheese-making process. Learn more about what causes the holes in Swiss cheese at U.S. Dairy.
Self-hosting got harder in 2025. Here's what changed.
On a QWERTY keyboard
What do concern trolls and privileged people without visible or invisible disabilities who share or make content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to projects have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’…
I was talking recently to a friend about a video essayist I like, (Dan Olson of Folding Ideas) and when asked why I thought he was any good I pondered it for a moment and said “he has a lot of respect for complexity”. On reflection, I think that is one of the virtues I […]
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Sound: Kalason oto (often simply “ kalason ”) Location : Alahan Panjang, Kab. Solok, West Sumatra This post is dedicated to Pak Budahar - a real Minang musical legend who literally spread music across Sumatra, providing sweet solace to his passengers for decades. Next time you honk your horn,
And yet it does. Are we ready to deal?
Re: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts There was a post recently that was dissing AI Skeptics. While the post is funny at times, I feel like it’s absolutely and completely missing the point of the skepticism. Or at least I feel that it is glossing over some massive pain points of said skepticism. Let’s go over some of…
This content is currently in the process of being archived and integrated into the CERN Library collections.
Private antitrust cases against Equifax, Pepsi, American Express, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Corteva are going through the courts. And it turns out, judges get the monopoly problem.
We analyze the system Amazon deploys on the US “amazon.com” storefront to restrict shipments of certain products to specific regions. We found 17,050 products that Amazon restricted from being shipped to at least one world region. - While many of the shipping restrictions are related to regulations involving WiFi, car…
New court documents shed light on what a 25-year-old DOGE worker named Marko Elez did inside Treasury Department payment systems, including what Treasury staff did to limit his access. The documents indicate that the situation is more nuanced than previously reported.
Fastly, you killed glitch.com and ruined your karma for 10,000 years. You have “betrayed yourself for nothing.”
A brief theory of young men, "the loneliness crisis," and life in the 21st century
How network science can help us understand who will be the next Pope. The study by Soda, Iorio, and Rizzo reveals how status, information and alliances influence the papal election.
