Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,441 posts.

Security & Privacy
Any year
4430

5 Problems with National ID Cards

The terrorist attacks of September 11have revived proposals for a national identity card system as a way to verify the identity of airline passengers and prevent terrorists from entering the country. For example, the Chairman and CEO of Oracle Corp., Larry Ellison, recently called for the creation of a national ID…

4431

The Difficulty Of Private Contact Discovery

Building a social network is not easy. Social networks have value proportional to their size, so participants aren’t motivated to join new social networks which aren’t already large. It’s a paradox where if people haven’t already joined, people aren’t motivated to join. The trouble is that whi...

4433

Ethereum is a Dark Forest

It’s no secret that the Ethereum blockchain is a highly adversarial environment. If a smart contract can be exploited for profit, it eventually will be. But this unforgiving environment pales in comparison to the mempool. If the chain itself is a battleground, the mempool is something worse: a dark forest.

4436

Why ninety-day lifetimes for certificates?

This is a historic blog post at this point. Please see our certificate lifetime documentation for the current status of certificate lifetimes. We’re sometimes asked why we only offer certificates with ninety-day lifetimes. People who ask this are usually concerned that ninety days is too short and wish we would offer…