Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 646 posts.
News that the Transportation Security Administration missed a whopping 95% of guns and bombs in recent airport security “red team” tests was justifiably shocking. It’s clear that we’re not getting value for the $7 billion we’re paying the TSA annually. But there’s another conclusion, inescapable and disturbing to…
"I think a lot of mathematics is really about how you understand things in your head. It's people that did mathematics, we're not just general purpose machines, we're people. We see things, we feel things, we think of things. A lot of what I have done in my mathematical career has had to do with finding new ways to…
On March 27 The following message was posted on the official GitHub blog: We are currently experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in github.coms history. The attack began around 2AM UTC on Thursday, March 26, and involves a wide combination of attack vectors. These incl[...]
The growing convergence of the designer and programmer roles by way of React
This month I invited to Q&A at PuPPy [https://youtu.be/2XviXtxWKO8?list=PL4S0lvhXvdhIV2C28Ia_DeIeloBrsQBOW] (the Puget Sound Python users group) that eventually led to me explaining why Python 3 came into existence and the whole string/bytes deal. I ended up receiving a compliment on the explanation which
Commentators are looking hard for what’s wrong with startups in Silicon Valley. First they talked about valuations being too high. Then they talked about valuations not really meaning anything. ...
Microsoft has renewed its Privacy Policy and Service Agreement. The new services agreement goes into effect on 1 August 2015, only a couple of days after the launch of the Windows 10 operating system on 29 July. The new “privacy dashboard” is presented to give the users a possibility to control their data related to…
TL;DR: Did you know that The Verge delivers you to around 20 companies for advertising & tracking purposes? I didn't. That might foul up your web experience a little bit. Maybe we should try something different.
Posted by Mark Seaborn, sandbox builder and breaker, with contributions by Thomas Dullien, revers...
We recently switched Google's two billion line repository over to BoringSSL , our fork of OpenSSL . This means that BoringSSL is now powering Chromium (on nearly all platforms), Android M and Google's production services. For the first time, the majority of Google's products are sharing a single TLS stack and making…
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors…
How to obtain encryption keys to decrypt the LastPass vault in different scenarios
Introducing our first white paper and new open-source codebase for a decentralized worldwide payment protocol.
After one week wearing an Apple Watch, my big picture thoughts and observations. It all hinges on the Taptic Engine and digital touch communication.
The following is a transcript of a teaching experiment, using the Socratic method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school. I present my perspective and views on the session, and on the Socratic method as a teaching tool, following the transcript. The class was conducted on a Friday afternoon…
We get asked (a lot) for statistics on the YC portfolio about valuation and fundraising. Although these are very imperfect indicators of success, here they are. All of these companies actually went through a YC batch and got their start with us (e.g. we do not include Quora). Also, the YC application for the next…
I’ve been listening to the excellent Season 2 of the podcast Startup , which gives an inside look at YCombinator startup The Dating Ring (NYT coverage here ). The episodes are all great. They talk about many important topics, but I had some specific comments on fundraising for dating products .
