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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 31,679 posts.
Teaching Claude Why
New research on how we've reduced agentic misalignment
OpenAI Releases Largest GPT-2 Text Generation Model
As the final model release of GPT-2’s staged release, we’re releasing the largest version (1.5B parameters) of GPT-2 along with code and model weights to facilitate detection of outputs of GPT-2 models. While there have been larger language models released since August, we’ve continued with our original staged release…
LibreOffice 6.0 released
Berlin, January 31, 2018 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0, a major release and a dramatically improved free office suite, which celebrates the 7th anniversary of the availability of the very first version of LibreOffice. Today LibreOffice is more powerful, simple and secure, and offers superior…
CouchDB 3.0
Dear community, Apache CouchDB® 3.0.0 has been released and is available for download. Apache CouchDB® lets you access your data where you need it. The Couch Replication Protocol is implemented in …
GTK 4.0 Released
2020 has been a very long year. What better way to end it than with a major release! Today, we released GTK 4.0. GTK 4.0 is the result of a lot of hard work by a small team of dedicated developers. We will have a separate post to go over the statistics, but the short...
From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
Airbnb brands itself as creating community and fostering belonging. Today, former Airbnb software engineer Sahil describes how “Airfam” ignores internal inequi…
Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp
WhatsApp has adopted and rolled out a new layer of security for users – built with Rust – as part of its effort to harden defenses against malware threats. WhatsApp’s experience creating and distri…
Malware infects Android-based automotive head unit firmware
Kaspersky expert has discovered new Android malware designed to serve ads and build a proxy botnet. It's delivered through legitimate software for DoFun head units.
What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages
As developers, we can *definitely* do better than 'Error 503 Service Unavailable' when it comes to error messages. This article shows you how.
EU copyright proposal could undermine the use of Creative Commons licenses
Over the last few years the European Union has been working on revising its rules on copyright. But the latest proposal from the head of the copyright committee would deny creators the right to refuse remuneration — the right to share a work without getting paid — which could undermine the use of CC licenses…
TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction
The Transportation Security Administration has set out an alarming vision of pervasive biometric surveillance at airports, which cuts against the right to privacy, the “right to travel,” and the right to anonymous association with others.The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, which included language...
One in three young people say they felt happier during lockdown
One in three young people say their mental health and wellbeing improved during COVID-19 lockdown measures, with potential contributing factors including feeling less lonely, avoiding bullying and getting more sleep and exercise, according to researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure
The 2020 Cloud Report compares AWS, GCP, and Azure on microbenchmarks and customer-like-workloads to understand performance tradeoffs within each cloud.
World of Warcraft: one simple line of code can cost you dearly (2016)
A few days ago, a new type of gold/item scam made the rounds. Usually scamming in MMORPGs is done using social engineering techniques, e.g. an attacker sells a fake item code for alleged in-game items like mounts to a potential victim for in-game currency. But this most recent kind of attack does not only involve…
Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone
Anyone can now sign up to use Cloudflare’s new privacy-first Web Analytics -- even without changing your DNS settings.
ITunes 11 and Colors
iTunes 11 is a radical departure from previous versions and nothing illustrates this more than the new album display mode. The headlining feature of this display is the new view style that visually matches the track listing to the album’s cover art. The result is an attractive display of textual information that…
gRPC: Internet-scale RPC framework is now 1.0
Building highly scalable, loosely coupled systems has always been tough. With the proliferation of mobile and IoT devices, burgeoning data volumes and increasing customer expectations, it's critical to be able to develop and run systems efficiently and reliably at internet scale.
Mozilla’s Manifest v3 FAQ
Developers have asked what Google's proposed changes to their extensions API, known as Manifest v3, mean for Mozilla. Here are some frequently asked questions.
Trust is Fragile
Taylor’s post about our growth in 2011 included a bunch of numbers showing how the pistons inside the 37signals engine are pounding faster, but it all got swept away by what seemed like an innocent side-note: The 100 millionth file was called cat.jpg. Being as it is that the internet is co…
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2020
We take a look at the Q1 2020 and lifetime performance of 129,764 hard drives used in the Backblaze data centers.
Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?
It came after ud0 and ud1.
Celebrating 10 Years of Firefox
10 years ago we built Firefox to give you a choice. The Web was a monoculture and the only way in was through the company that controlled your operating sy