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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
A Council of the European Union document leaked by Statewatch on 30 August reveals that during the summer months, that Estonia (current EU Presidency) has been pushing the other Member States to strengthen indiscriminate internet surveillance, and to follow in the footsteps of China regarding online censorship…
Propaganda is most impactful when people don't think it's propaganda, and most decisive when it's censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived.
A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press
WILMINGTON, N.C.—Wayne Nutt is an engineer. He graduated with a degree in engineering and worked most of his career in North Carolina without ever needing […]
If you live in an economy where officials are corrupt, contracts are hard to enforce, and trust is scarce, everyday transactions are burdensome and time-consuming. If you don’t want to get scammed,…
This is a really strange blog post to have to write, simply because the situation is absurd. It would be comedic, really, if the situation was not costing me money and resulted in one of my best-se…
Written by an actual teen
LinkedIn Ads are awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic that make the platform's value extremely dubious, according to a new study from RMG.
Alternatively titled ‘Be aware of context, and maybe start using Google AdWords’ Instead
The other day I was sitting on the doorstep of a hackerspace, eating a falafel sandwich while listening to the conversation inside. The topic shifted to the use of “AI” for everyday tasks, people casually started elaborating on how they use “chat assistants” to let them write pieces of code or annoying emails. The…
right to repair laws should include provisions requiring manufacturers to unlock a device's bootloader (to provide root access) upon consumer request.
This letter has been sent by the undersigned to EU & US regulators, to urge them to take action on banning surveillance-based ads, as recommended by the NCC.
Louis Rossmann has created a movement around right to repair. It's not just iPhones. It's everywhere.
I’m kind of broken. It has been a very productive day. I have been here since 8 in the morning. We have boxed over 400 boxes of material. There have been about a dozen and a half of volunteer…
On 15 and 16 October 2026, a crawler that said it belonged to Roblox walked through almost every project on Open3DLab, SFMLab and SmutBase, and proceeded to download complete copies of 1,027 files from 712 projects. 145.5 GB of our creators' work, downloaded for what we assume are AI training purposes.
You may have seen the TSA Randomizer on your last flight. A TSA agent holds an iPad. The agent taps the iPad, a large arrow points right or left, and you follow it into a given lane.
Mass surveillance costs millions of Dollars. Yet, it does not improve security.
firstunitarianvnsa-final.pdf
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.
Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” or “upscale”?
First of all, this blogpost is kinda long. Let me prove to you reading it will actually have some payoff:
Get ready for the CCPA compliance scams from Princeton.
Five years ago, the Philadelphia police thought that carrying Arabic-language flashcards was enough to warrant the arrest of an innocent traveler. A settlement reached today in a lawsuit I brought against the police department makes it clear that it is not.
New EPFL research has found that almost half of local Twitter trending topics in Turkey are fake, a scale of manipulation previously unheard of. It also proves for the first time that many trends are created solely by bots due to a vulnerability in Twitter’s Trends algorithm.
I was pleasantly surprised when somebody shared my traveling salesman animation to reddit and the post made it all the way to reddit’s default front page (i.e. the top 25). The gif racked up over 1.3 …
In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magic...
