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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,456 posts.
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How secure is HTTPS today? How often is it attacked? (2011)
This is part 1 of a series on the security of HTTPS and TLS/SSL HTTPS is a lot more secure than HTTP! If a site uses accounts, or publishes material that people might prefer to read in private, the site should be protected with HTTPS. Unfortunately, is still feasible for some attackers to break...
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Announcing pqR: A faster version of R
pqR — a “pretty quick” version of R — is now available to be downloaded, built, and installed on Linux/Unix systems. This version of R is based on R-2.15.0, but with many performance im…
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Free "Lisp Hackers" Ebook
More than a year passed since I had started to publish a series of interviews with Lisp hackers . It was a great project, but I'm going to...
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EFF: Help Us Protect Mesh Networking From Overbroad Patents
Earlier this year, we announced that along with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, we were challenging six patent applications that, if granted, could threaten the development of 3D printing technology. We asked you—the community—for help, and your input was...
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How Browsers Store Your Passwords (and Why You Shouldn't Let Them)
Introduction In a previous post , I introduced a Twitter bot called dumpmon which monitors paste sites for account dumps, configuration fi...
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What Product Companies Can Learn From Consulting Companies
Surprisingly, you can sell $50 SaaS more effectively with tactics used to sell $50,000 consulting engagements.
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Don't Look for Talent, Find People Who Do Things
I wrote a blog post a while ago about what one of my former assistants did after working for me, and in it I wondered why so many of them have had success. My conclusion was that:
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Prince Of Persia Code Review
On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. Even though it is the Apple II version written in 6502 assembly language, it was a pleasant experience to dive in the code of that mythical game: As usual there were many fascinating sofware wizardries to discover. The Apple II apparent poor…
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How to travel around the world for a year
While my last post covered my previous year traveling, writing and programming [http://old.alexmaccaw.com/posts/traveling_writing_programming], this article will go into the specifics of planning your own round the world trip, including flights, costs, activities and accommodation. I'll show you how affordable…
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Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’…
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Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub
Since spring, and even before that, I have participated in a great collaborative effort on writing a book on Homotopy Type Theory. It is finally finished and ready for public consumption. You can get the book freely at http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ . Mike Shulman has written about the contents of the book , so I…
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What asm.js is and isn't
This is going to be a bit long, so tl;dr asm.js is a formalization of a pattern of JavaScript that has been developing in a natural way o...
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This is a web page
We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things.
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What happened to innovation?
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the pace of innovation has slowed, and if so, what that means. After some particularly brutal pitches that felt like Saturday Night Live parodies of...
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An App Store Experiment
What happened when I built a 7-minute workout app in a single night and launched it quietly.
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Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the…
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Finding Sociopaths on Facebook
On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways…
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Blowback from the NSA surveillance.
There’s one piece of blowback that isn’t being discussed—aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade—and that’s how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US’s role in Internet governance. Ron Deibert makes this point: But…
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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Your Feedback Matters – Update on Xbox One
Your Feedback Matters – Update on Xbox One, Xbox One, Xbox, Microsoft
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