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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
Gary K Wolf is the author of a fantastic 1981 novel called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? which Disney licensed and turned into an equally fantastic 1988 live action/animated hybrid movie called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But despite the commercial and critical acclaim of the movie, Disney hasn't made any feature-length…
This is a map of primary trading partners, US vs China, and how it has evolved over the last 20 years. Think about it, and realize this probably reflects your experience.
How to get people to NOT contact you
Millions are exploring European alternatives for privacy-friendly tech. Which are the top categories, top tools, and the global demand driving this shift.
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.
In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magic...
The researchers demonstrate that an engineered antibody improves a class of drugs that has struggled to make good on its early promise.
Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine.
What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News. What bothers me is that it’s unexplained.
Imagine entering the biggest library in the world. You peer down an incredibly long aisle with wooden bookshelves brimming with books. You can see multiple such corridors, all lit with a comfortable warm light. There’s a rich smell of old paper. You can hear some muted voices, perhaps arguing in a whisper. It’s…
A co-worker of mine (the incomparable Yohei Manabe) was looking at some disassembled ARM code the other day, and discovered something weird. Lots of d4d4 instructions, scattered about. LLVM’s objdump says this is a relative branch to -0x58 . The weird part is that they were always unreachable.
RENO, Nev.—In a major victory for property rights, today a Washoe County judge ruled that Nevada law enforcement cannot use a federal program to bypass […]
I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s a place where people post
There are a lot of assumptions one could make when designing data types and schemas for aviation data that turn out to be inaccurate. In the spirit of Patrick McKenzie’s classic piece on names, here are some false assumptions one might make about aviation.
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
Building a state machine for travel - tracking Schengen days, the 183-day rule for tax residency across countries, and visa thresholds when governments won't expose state.
When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google…
Big Tech Oligopoly helps the Trump Administration crack down on free speech
Ofcom — driven by the letter of British law that they are bound to follow, but still Ofcom — are quietly making Britain look (a) very silly and (b) as if we haven’t yet shucked-off the Americ…
I've been using Feeder to keep up with the news for awhile now. For a long time, I just checked AllSides. But then I found out NPR in my state supports ...
Same people, 13 years later.
With the Fall 2025 anime season, Crunchyroll demonstrates zero respect for anime as a medium as the presentation quality of its subtitles reach an all-time low.
This isn't innovation, it's tyranny
Privacy is when they promise to protect your data. Anonymity is when they never had your data to begin with.
