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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,067 posts.
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…
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Twelve years ago I posted on how our era is a rare unique “dreamtime” of fast growth, wide cultural integration, and delusional beliefs.
What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can…
What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years. I have sold to and bought from Amazon in about as many ways as one person can; I built an auto parts brand …
When the Romans came to Great Britain, they built a bunch of forts called castra, which was Anglicized to chester. So, English cities whose names end in -chester, -caster and -cester were once Roma…
I love when people call what we do at 37signals a “lifestyle business” — but probably not for the reasons they think. When the lifestyle card is pulled from its tired deck, it’s usually meant as a pat on top of the head. An “oh, that’s such a pretty drawing, dea…
So for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them…
Introduction
In the late 1990s, eurozone wannabes squeezed and stretched to meet the criteria for accession, including low inflation and government deficits, and moderate levels of debt. The criteria were somew…
Terence Faulkner wrote 1/3 of the opposing arguments in this year's SF voter guide. And large chunks of them read like he's yelling at you.
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
On the irony of cameras built to police Iranians becoming the regime’s Achilles’ heel
At the heart of Edward Snowden's decision to expose the NSA's massive phone and Internet spying programs was a fundamental belief in the people's right-to-know. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," he …
Federal court records belong to everyone. But one federal court in Texas lets patent litigants treat courts like their own private tribunals, effectively shutting out the public.When EFF tried to intervene and push for greater access to a patent dispute earlier this year, the U.S. District Court...
I have been teaching about legal reasoning and legal argumentation for years. When I do so, I try to impress upon students that legal argume...
Fired at 17 for leaking secrets. Served a cybercrime ring. Named by the Social Security whistleblower. Now the government’s model employee.
For decades, social psychologists have understood that the link between attitudes and conduct is convoluted, if not weak. Both online and offline, this is
Looking for a way to help the Internet stay open and free? This topic needs some dedicated...
In life, love, war, and planetary colonization, even long-lasting friendships can end if one betrays the other's trust for his own gain. We studied the language of betrayal by observing players of Diplomacy , the game that ruins friendships . In this very popular game, players can form alliances and try to conquer the…
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit today against the Justice Department to shed light on whether the government has ever used secret court orders to force technology companies to decrypt their customers’ private communications, a...
This post is about the reason I will probably never try to warn any organisation in Belgium about any vulnerability again. Recently I have been dealing with an attempt at coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) with an organisation in Belgium. This post is not about that, because I’m not allowed to write about it…
Yesterday, we blacked out the default start page in Firefox and redirected visitors to the Mozilla sites to a special action page. We also sent direct mess
Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. That's why today, we're launching EFF.org/Age, a one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what these laws actually do…
