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Wildlife Garden Activities
Make your garden a haven for wildlife with our garden activities. From building a bird box to attracting beneficial insects, there's something for everyone
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 809 posts.
242
On Covering Webcams
The problem isn’t your camera, it’s malware. Don’t install any software from unknown or sketchy sources, keep your OS up to date, and you should be fine. And if you do have malware on your Mac, the webcam is likely the least of your problems.
243
How to design a proper USB-C™ power sink (hint, not the way Raspberry Pi 4 did it)
This issue came up recently for a high profile new gadget that has made the transition from Micro-USB to USB-C in its latest version, the…
244
Even God Couldn't Beat Dollar-Cost Averaging
A market timing strategy rarely outperforms dollar cost averaging even when that strategy knows exactly when to buy.
245
Ketamine: Now By Prescription
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. …
246
Police Have No Duty to Protect You, Federal Court Affirms Yet Again
The “social contract” is a one-way street. You pay your taxes or go to jail. In return, the government may or may not provide some of those services you
247
NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program?
Intro Okay developers, time to have a serious talk. As you are probably already aware, this week React, Babel, and a bunch of other high-profile packages on NPM broke. The reason they broke is rather astounding: A simple NPM package called left-pad that was a dependency of their code. left-pad, at the time of writing…
248
Congress and the Public
Do you approve or disapprove of the way [ROTATED -- The Republicans in Congress. The Democrats in Congress.] are handling their job? Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?
249
Internet
More than half of the world is online, but the Internet is still young.
250
Crop Yields
Increasing crop yields is crucial to improve food security, living standards, and reduce human impacts on the environment.
251
I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me
After 4 months of waiting, that is the response I got from Widevine, Google’s DRM for web browsers, regarding a license agreement. For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source…
252
The Product-Minded Software Engineer
Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They're someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide
253
NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
254
Visual Information Theory (2015)
I love the feeling of having a new way to think about the world. I especially love when there’s some vague idea that gets formalized into a concrete concept. Information theory is a prime example of this.
255
Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
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Fast Software, the Best Software
Essay on the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
258
Implications of Rewriting a Browser Component in Rust
Since our first release in 2002, there have been 69 security bugs in Firefox’s style component. If we'd had a time machine and could have written this component in Rust from the start, 51% wouldn't have happened. That said, Rust is not foolproof. Developers still need to be aware of correctness bugs and data leakage…
259
IBM casts doubt on Google's claims of quantum supremacy
We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.
260
Remote code execution vulnerability in apt/apt-get
tl;dr I found a vulnerability in apt that allows a network man-in-the-middle (or a malicious package mirror) to execute arbitrary code as root on a machine i...
261
The Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure, composable future for WebAssembly
Lin Clark introduces the Bytecode Alliance, and uses Code Cartoon illustrations to share their vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. ...
262
Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser
Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser. We think it’s worthwhile to work on moving the ...
263
WeWTF, Part Deux
So, the mother of all party crashers took a dump in the We IPO punch bowl. The crasher? Math. The autopsy will show the shelving of this IPO was death by S-1.
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JIT-Less V8
V8 v7.4 supports JavaScript execution without allocating executable memory at runtime.
266
Technology Preview: Signal Private Group System
Groups are inherently social, and Signal is a social app. Whether you’re planning a surprise party, discussing last night’s book club meeting, exchanging photos with your family, or organizing something important, group messaging has always been a key feature of Signal. Signal provides private gr...
267
Modern C++ Won't Save Us
I’m a frequent critic of memory unsafe languages, principally C and C++, and how they induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities. My conclusion, based on reviewing evidence from numerous large software projects using C and C++, is that we need to be migrating our industry to memory safe by default…
268
How Apps on Android Share Data with Facebook (2018)
Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using…
269
Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway
I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. A forme...
270
Why Do Buses Bunch?
Created by Lewis Lehe (of Setosa and UC Berkeley Trans. Eng. ) with design and art by Dennys Hess . Thanks to Ian Johnson for good advice. Tools: d3 , Angular Material , Coffeescript , Browserify , Gulp and Five-Hour Energy Drink .