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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it…
Most websites can't tell you about them. But I can.
That's the problem with deploying play-acting as "solutions:" play-acting doesn't actually fix the problems at the source, it simply lets th...
A reaction and assorted observations about Apple's September 9 Awe-Dropping event.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits.The sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority...
If you are a current or former career Bureau of the Fiscal Service Employee, especially if you’re a legacy IT programmer with years of experience and especially if you are a COBOL programmer currently working on the PAM, SPS or any other adjacent team, contact me over email or
Today, 43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society, up from 34% in 2022.
We are products with labels
At FTX, Frank, and Pollen, software engineers were asked to do something potentially illegal, or to go along with what looked like fraud. They obliged in two out of three cases, landed in hot water, and now face jail time. A reminder why it’s never a good idea to go along with such requests.
For many years, data brokers have existed in the shadows, exploiting gaps in privacy laws to harvest our information—all for their own profit. They sell our precise movements without our knowledge or meaningful consent to a variety of private and state actors, including law enforcement agencies....
Best case: we're in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they're doing.
Today, when my 1.9-year-old daughter tried to grab and eat an unwashed orange, I asked her to give it to me so I could wash and peel it if she could wait for a moment. She did. It got me thinking about the marshmallow experiment, where the idea was that patience equals success. But … […]
March 2025
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In 2013, a failing founder posted their story on Hacker News (link). The responses were overwhelmingly supportive: "Failure is just an event, not who you are." "Get back up and try again!"
Antitrust critics say that homebuilding monopolies are the real culprit of America’s housing woes. I looked into some of their claims. They don’t hold up.
Bitchat is a new messaging app that allows users to chat securely with or without internet access. Download it today via the App Store or Google Play store to begin communicating safely, even when connectivity disappears. Why Bitchat is needed Palestinians are dependent on Israel for their access to electricity,
Apple's rules and technical restrictions are blocking other browser vendors from successfully offering their own engines to users in the EU.
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what does MrBeast mean?
GPTZero used our Hallucination Check tool to find 50+ hallucinations under review at ICLR, each of which were missed by 3-5 peer reviewers.
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.
Read more on the Riksbank’s website.
