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Ending Bitcoin Support
Starting today, we are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 716 posts.
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We're Baking ‘Have I Been Pwned’ into Firefox and 1Password
Pretty much every day, I get a reminder from someone about how little people know about their exposure in data breaches. Often, it's after someone has searched Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and found themselves pwned somewhere or other. Frequently, it's some long-forgotten site
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Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS and Azure grew by…
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Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)
A magnifying glass concentrates light on a small spot. As many mischevious kids can tell you, a magnifying glass as small as a square inch in size can collect enough light to start a fire. A little Googling will tell you that the Sun is 400,000 times brighter than the Moon, so all we need is a 400,000-square-inch…
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SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
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Linkers and Loaders (1999)
The text in these files is the unedited original manuscript. M-K has fine copy editors, who have fixed all the minor typos, spelling, and grammar errors in the printed book, but if you come across factual errors I'd still appreciate help getting all the details of linking and loading as complete and correct as…
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Pointers Are Complicated, or What’s in a Byte?
This summer, I am again working on Rust full-time, and again I will work (amongst other things) on a “memory model” for Rust/MIR. However, before I can talk about the ideas I have for this ...
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Floating-Point Determinism (2013)
Is IEEE floating-point math deterministic? Will you always get the same results from the same inputs? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Unfortunately the answer is also an unequivocal “no”. I’m a…
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Federated Learning: Collaborative Machine Learning without Centralized Training
Posted by Brendan McMahan and Daniel Ramage, Research ScientistsStandard machine learning approaches require centralizing the training data on one ...
131
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the…
132
The facts about a recent counterfeiting case brought by the U.S. government
In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012, and we have received a number of questions about this case and our role in it. Although the case was not one that we brought, the questions raised recently have caused us...
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Each Country's Share of CO2 Emissions
Which 20 countries emit the most carbon dioxide? You may be surprised.
134
Embryo Selection For Intelligence
A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016–2017 state-of-the-art.
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Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
People call WebAssembly a game changer because it makes it possible to run code on the web faster. Some speedups are already present, and some are yet to come. With ...
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Calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly are finally fast
At Mozilla, we want WebAssembly to be as fast as it can be. This started with its design, which gives it great throughput. Then we improved load times with a ...
137
A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit
I am very excited to announce details of the first homemade integrated circuit and share the journey that this project has taken me on over the past year. I hope that my success will inspire others and help start a revolution in home chip fabrication. When I set out on this project I had no idea of what I had gotten…
138
Too Clever by Half
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…
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OpenAI Five
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
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Deep reinforcement learning doesn't work yet
June 24, 2018 note: If you want to cite an example from the post, please cite the paper which that example came from. If you want to cite the post as a whole, you can use the following BibTeX:
141
AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…
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Let’s talk about PAKE
The first rule of PAKE is: nobody ever wants to talk about PAKE. The second rule of PAKE is that this is a shame, because PAKE — which stands for Password Authenticated Key Exchange — is actually o…
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The Wisdom And/or Madness of Crowds
an interactive guide to human networks
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Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass
Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass, a recently-announced privacy-preserving protocol developed in collaboration with researchers from Royal Holloway and the University of Waterloo.
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The History of Pets vs Cattle and How to Use the Analogy Properly
I have been meaning to write this post for a long time, but one thing or another has gotten in the way. It’s important to me to provide an accurate history, ...
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Productivity
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
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1/0 = 0
Disclaimer 2024-12-02 Since this rant is going viral again (again (again)), some disclaimers: I wrote this six years ago to “”“win”“” an ugly Twitter fight. I’m glad I anonymized the inciting tweet and hope I’m the only person still getting grief over this. The core interesting bit— why it’s mathematically valid to…
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