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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,046 posts.
1022
After AI takes everything
Prompted by letters from three engineers, the author asks what remains for humans as AI takes over execution, naming judgment, taste, and derivation as irreplaceable, and warns against the erosion of subjecthood.
1023
The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker
The implicit contract — work hard, stay employed, build a life — is broken.
1024
The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist
How did we get here? And how do we get back?
1025
How much of HN is AI?
TL;DR: 62% as of September 2026. This is up from ~40% in February.
1026
The Last Surviving Japanese Porsche 912 Police Car
Oof, what a beauty. In the 1960s, four Porsche 912s were customized for use as police cars in Japan. This one, which was used in Kanagawa until 1973, is the onl
1027
The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
1028
The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users
If you're not a screen reader user yourself, you might be surprised to learn that the text to speech technology used by most blind people hasn't changed in the last 30 years. While text to speech has taken the sighted world by storm, in everything from personal assistants to GPS to telephone systems, the voices used…
1029
Cameras built to police Iranians became the regime's Achilles' heel
On the irony of cameras built to police Iranians becoming the regime’s Achilles’ heel
1030
Big Balls Now Exposed to Serious Criminal Charges in at Least Six States
Fired at 17 for leaking secrets. Served a cybercrime ring. Named by the Social Security whistleblower. Now the government’s model employee.
1031
Plug-in solar is coming. Plug-in batteries should follow
Plug-in batteries could help millions more households access the bill-saving benefits of home energy storage. With plug-in solar now on the way, Regen argues that the government should make plug-in batteries next.
1032
UK intelligence censored report on global warming and homeland security
Series: I read it so you don't have to
1033
MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
1034
The Beauty of Roundabouts
I have a weird soft spot for roundabouts. Maybe because I'm a software engineer and the roundabout strikes me as the simple, elegant solution while the traffic light intersection is the ad-hoc, over-engineered mess.
1035
We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
What the **** does that mean?
1036
1037
The most-disliked people in the publishing industry
One way of studying literature is through direct experience.
1038
The Brain Sandwich
The brain sandwich is a practical AI coding workflow: understand the problem, let an agent help, then verify and explain its work before sharing it.
1039
1040
The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.
1041
Palantir: Financed by Epstein, Fueled by Thiel
Palantir took Epstein’s money, Thiel’s backing, and Trump’s blessing to build an AI war machine. If Gaza is the testing ground, America’s next. Are we ready to fight back?
1042
Give Up GitHub – Software Freedom Conservancy
The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a non-profit home and services to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.
1043
Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models
Our measurements of the time horizons for public frontier language models.
1044
Key findings about how Americans view artificial intelligence
Drawing on five years of Pew Research Center surveys, here are 13 findings about how Americans use and view AI, and where they see promise and risk.
1045
Wolves, sheep, and gypsies
In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as…
1046
Joint statement from Google and Apple
Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and clou…