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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 13,064 posts.
Stories about computer security tend to go viral when they bridge the vast divide between geeks and luddites, and this week’s news about a hacker who tried to poison a Florida town’s water supply was understandably front-page material. But for security nerds who’ve been warning about this sort of thing for ages, the…
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
This post is about an idea I had around 1997, when I was 16 years old and a freshman computer-science major at Cornell. Back then, I was extremely impressed by a research project called CLEVER, wh…
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
So many sci-fi movies, anime, and video games owe a massive debt of gratitude to William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.
After being an early adopter of Facebook and using it for over a decade, I decided to delete my account. Here's why.
What it means for software to be fast, and why most software is not.
David shares how the new age of information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics. Read here.
Many readers probably believe they can trust links and emails coming from U.S. federal government domain names, or else assume there are at least more stringent verification requirements involved in obtaining a .gov domain versus a commercial one ending in .com or .org. But a recent experience suggests this trust may…
In a shamefully credulous statement, they say: Proponents of pseudonymity scored a major victory today, when Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that social networking service Google+ will begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity. According to Mashable, Google+ will be "adding…
The FSFE and LUGBZ have recognized VLC president and core developer with this European award for his long-term dedication to the project. What began as a s...
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this...
You know nothing John Snow
A few weeks ago we fought a battle for transparency in our flagship NSA spying case, Jewel v. NSA. But, ironically, we weren't able to tell you anything about it until now. On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on...
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
Why the Austin airport situation was so dangerous.
I decided to make a quick summary of facts about Sci-Hub and myself, because in our times you cannot fully trust articles published in media, Wikipedia pages. Well, they do present facts about Sci-…
Federal law enforcement has been asking for a backdoor to read Americans’ encrypted communications for years now. FBI Director Christopher Wray did it again last week in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As usual, the FBI’s complaints involved end-to-end encryption employed by popular...
Young Americans today spend 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the 21st century. Why?
Search was 49.7% of Alphabet's revenue in Q3 2026, down from 62% in early 2019, as Google Cloud grew much faster. Every quarter since 2018, from Alphabet's earnings releases.
Imagine your performance at work was assessed directly from the amount of e-mails sent, the amount of time consumed editing a document, or the time spent in meetings or even moving your mouse. This may sound ludicrous but your boss might be doing exactly that.
