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If you love a website, back it up
This story starts with a little tragedy. See, I’ve got these old webpages I love to go back and look on every now and then. There’s websites that h...
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 1,045 posts.
122
I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program
I wrote to Flock’s privacy contact to opt out of their …
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Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
We asked 14 AI models for their most controversial opinion of humans, three times each. 35 of 41 answers were the same one: we care more about belonging than about the truth.
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SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
SQLite is a Recommended Storage Format for datasets according to the US Library of Congress . Further information:
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The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
UNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2026 warns that exceeding 1.5°C is inevitable and calls for urgent emissions cuts to limit warming and reverse the trend.
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Hold on to Your Hardware
A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.
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OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine
53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.
128
Jev meets the Trolley Problem
I asked Jev and 13 other decision models the Trolley Problem.
129
Attention Media ≠ Social Networks
When web-based social networks started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social networks. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine…
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Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees
Many employers worry remote workers feel disconnected. A new study found they reported higher well-being and were no more likely to feel isolated than their
131
The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its…
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The recurring dream of replacing developers
Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers.
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A/I shuts down
The day we discovered we had been designated a global terrorist organization, we promised that we would try to resist as long as this was possible, that we would not back down as long as we could see options to stand our ground. For years, we have proudly maintained and defended a free, privacy-friendly, autonomous…
135
License plate reader searches should require a warrant
So while I work with police departments regularly, I think it is critically important that technology be used reasonably. While this may be off-putting to some of my clients, I worked with the Inst…
136
Court finds Fourth Amendment doesn’t support broad search of protesters’ devices
In a big win for protesters’ rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data.The case, Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs, arose...
137
Google Declaring War on the Web
In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the…
138
They're made out of meat (1991)
Copyright, Terry Bisson, 1991 Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first…
139
De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
Top dollar no more? Discover the factors threatening the dominance of the world’s reserve currency and how this is playing out across markets.
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Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
(New York, September 21, 2026) Explosive new documents released last Thursday in Authors Guild v. OpenAI—the major book authors’ ongoing lawsuit alleging OpenAI and Microsoft illegally trained their products on copyrighted books—show that executives and employees at both companies intentionally […]
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Where things stand with the Department of War
A statement from Dario Amodei
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It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs
Over the last several months, the two leading frontier AI labs have shown some brazen behavior. It started with a series of carefully planned announcements ... Read more
143
A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
But the Institute is facing ongoing challenges in two related areas: funding, and our talent pipeline.
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The revolt of the reader
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life.
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The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
A fabulously gay blind Romance author.
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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
There is a profound tension here: english specifications intuitively feel precise until you learn better from bitter experience. (It's all in that facial expression of the last frame.)
148
I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband
You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night.
149
So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
I am equally unsurprised and upset
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In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.