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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,047 posts.
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Why I'm in the Army Reserve – an explainer for my friends in tech
Outside my day job doing compiler research at Shopify, I lead the Cheshire Yeomanry , a squadron of British Army Reserve light cavalry . I spend about a hundred days a year of my spare-time in evenings, weekends, and holidays, training my Squadron.
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Today Google is turning on tracking for many users that previously turned it off
Workspace admins can no longer deactivate Google activity tracking for their users, Google says this is helping people.
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What is money, anyway?
Editor’s Note: This topic is now comprehensively covered in my book, Broken Money. Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something…
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Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study
DURHAM, N.C. -- In 1923, lead was first added to gasoline to help keep car engines healthy. However, automotive health came at the great expense of our own well-being.
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What are you doing, WordPress.com?
Be sure to check out the update at the bottom. I recently wrote that I've stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind WordPress.com is running a good business…
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I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general
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The human genome is, at long last, complete
Results of automated DNA sequencing, displayed on the screen of a tablet computer. (Turtle Rock Scientific/Science Photo Library)
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Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right
In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users’ privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don’t want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple...
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Signal Introduces Stories
If your favorite way to update your friends about life disappears in 24 hours, we’ve got some happy news for you. Stories are now available on Signal for Android and iOS, with Desktop coming soon!
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TikTok updated privacy policy to collect faceprints and voiceprints (2021)
TikTok has violated privacy regulations before, and they are in position to share millions of American users' data with the Chinese government.
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Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)
When Calvin and Hobbes went out of print twenty years ago, I think most people assumed it would return at some point. I know I certainly did. Calvin and Hobbes was a formative part of my youth - the sly brilliant writing and stark black and white illustrations providing color to my sense of
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CCC captures U.S. military biometrics database
The U.S. military used biometric devices en masse to capture people in Afghanistan. Some devices were left behind during the hasty withdrawal of NATO troops. CCC researchers found large amounts of...
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The coming tsunami of fakery
How the Dead Internet Theory is fast becoming reality thanks to zero, marginal-cost content generated at infinite scale
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I'm done with Google
My auntie is in hospital for christmas this year. It's been identified as flu, but it seriously affected her because she has a lot of heath problems inclu...
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California Right to Repair Bill Dies in Senate Committee
The California Senate Appropriations committee failed to pass Sen. Susan Eggman’s (Stockton) Right to Repair bill, SB 983, Thursday, which would have significantly expanded Californians’ access to the parts, tools, and service information needed to fix consumer electronics and appliances.
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230K Chinese “persuaded to return” from abroad to establish Extraterritoriality
This latest installment in Safeguard Defenders’ Investigations series takes a deep dive into the Chinese police’s expanding global policing toolkit by examining a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (accordin
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A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)
Don't try this at home.
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Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
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Web3 is centralized
I've long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I…
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An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
On Wednesday 10 August, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam. He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash. Multiple arrests are not ruled out…
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Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion
What images were used to train Stable Diffusion's text-to-image AI model? I worked with Simon Willison to make a data browser to explore and search a sample of 12 million images.
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School vs. Wikipedia
Edit: Oh! Hello, there, HN . For context, we're talking about elementary school here. More importantly, I'm not arguing that students should get quick answers from encyclopedias instead of reading books and other primary sources. I'm arguing that Wikipedia is better than "a Google search," which is a position I will…
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That wild Ask a Manager story
Ask A Manager had a wild story a week ago. A company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for work … it was a totally different person. A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?” Nothing. I would do nothing…