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The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 992 posts.
Four months ago I decided to buy a Tesla Model 3. What promised to be an exciting adventure in the world of electric cars, and some of the most advanced technology brought directly from Silicon Valley, ended up becoming a nightmare from which I still have not found my way out.
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
The shameless spin around Stargate UAE
Romance fraud has been growing as an issue for years. It's not uncommon to see news stories with bewildered victims explaining just how deeply they'd been sucked in. After receiving a number of opener
Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other
Leaked documents reveal how a secretive alliance of eleven large multinational enterprises has worked to tear down the EU’s CSDDD.
Readers may recall that Japan recently passed the Smartphone Act, officially the Bill on the Promotion of Competition for Specified Software Used in…
As the administration does its best to hide public records from the public, Wired magazine is stepping up to help stem the secrecy
Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio/Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think. It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this […]
This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini. They’re in my workflow like everyone else’s. But the tradecraft is slipping. Analysts are skipping the hard parts. They’re trusting GenAI to do the heavy cognitive lifting, and it’s changing how we operate at a foundational level.
I wrote last month about my diabetes diagnosis this year and my difficult choice to wear a proprietary device (called a CGM) on my arm 24/7 to continuously monitor my glucose levels. Like my friend and colleague, Karen M. Sandler — who previously made a much higher-stakes choice to receive a proprietary implanted…
This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI. A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a …
I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.
So many sci-fi movies, anime, and video games owe a massive debt of gratitude to William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.
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...
Young Americans today spend 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the 21st century. Why?
The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some receipts. If you’re…
Thanks in part to your support, the right to repair is now law in Washington.Gov. Bob Ferguson signed two bills guaranteeing Washingtonians' right to access tools, parts, and information so they can fix personal electronics, appliances, and wheelchairs. This is the epitome of common-sense...
Preamble: The whole affair is Google’s fault and not Bear Blog’s. Huge thanks to Herman—Bear Blog’s founder and dev—for his patience and help. A month afte...
AI is being done wrong.
Can a game work where all you do is scroll?
I have been working inside a dating app for a few months and there are a lot of interesting things. This article is going to be without any structure as there are many things to say. I will mostly ignore homosexual interactions. Not because they don't exist, just because it …
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
Why Apple Intelligence failed even though everything it's built upon is nearly perfect
Most PG&E ratepayers don't understand how much higher the rates they pay are than what it actually costs PG&E to generate and transmit the electricity to their house. When I looked into this recently I was shocked. The average PG&E electricity charge now starts at 40 cents per kilowatt hour and goes up from there …
Largest systematic review of AI benchmarks highlights need for clearer definitions and stronger scientific standards.
