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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
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Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. hit a record high in 2026, with broad agreement across partisan lines.
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Kubernetes is our generation's Multics
Yesterday's post enumerated # blog-topics related to understanding and using shell. Today's post started out as a "grab bag" of other topics, but is now centered around problems with # distributed-systems .
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Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out
With mere days left before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House, President Barack Obama’s administration just finalized rules to make it easier for the nation’s intelligence agencies to share unfiltered information about innocent people. New rules issued by the Obama administration...
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My Uber driver robbed me, so I took Uber to court and won
Hello Spicy Compatriots, I know this is not typical on a business blog, but I want to share what happened to potentially help someone in a similar situation. If you have followed my twitter account since December, you might know that I was robbed by my Uber driver. He intentionally drove off with my backpack…
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Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
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Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
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MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
This is part of a series of profiles detailing the experiences of institutions that have unbundled or canceled big deal journal contracts. The aim of the series is to provide insights, lessons learned, and inspiration to libraries that might consider a similar move.
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Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado
The Nobel Peace Prize 2025 was awarded to Maria Corina Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy"
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Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb
OverviewA long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to mo…
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“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – a “study”
This write-up was originally posted on reddit , though I've cleaned things up specifically for this post. Due to reasons discussed towards the end of this post, I'm not entirely happy with the results and intend to take another shot at it in the near future.
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Enough with the dead butterflies
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
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Being poor vs. being broke
The more I speak about being poor, the more I realize how fundamentally other folks misunderstand what it means to be poor versus being broke.
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Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
Or "Spiderman Is My Boyfriend"
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Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is filing suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of the United States. The lawsuit challenges the NSA’s mass surveillanc…
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Khan Academy launches Khan World School online high school
Discover Khan World School @ ASU Prep, a fully online school for grades 6-12 with mastery-based learning, global collaboration and college credit options.
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I Am Not A Number. In memory of the more than 72,000 Palestinians killed
In memory of the Palestinians killed in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
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Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
As I’ve posted before and many others have noted , there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.
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De-escalating social media conflict
Designing humility and forgiveness into social media products
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Death by AI
One man's struggle with his mortality.
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Web scraping for me, but not for thee
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping. Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to...
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EFF Wins Battle Over Secret Legal Opinions on Government Spying
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has won its four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over secret legal interpretations of a controversial section of the Patriot Act, including legal analysis of law enforcement and intelligence agency access to census records. The U.S....
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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden.
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The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid
UPDATE: The server has been returned. Please read.
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