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PIA VPN to be acquired by malware company founded by former Israeli spy

telegra.ph/private-internet-access-vpn-acquired-by-malware-business-founded-by-former-israeli-spies-12-0120191,004 points359 commentsSecurity & Privacy details

arccompute.com/blog The following article contains quotes and links meant to inform VPN consumers concerning the ownership, affiliations, and past business practices of Kape Technologies (formerly known as Crossrider) in light of their acquisition of Private Internet Access VPN. I'd like to start by giving credit…

A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet

Previously: security engineer at Square/Block, co-author of HackLang, put the 's' in https at Facebook/Meta. Maker of CTFs.

Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration

It’s time to kill the web app

Mike Hearn20171,003 points702 commentsWeb & Frontend details

Something is going on. The people are unhappy. The spectre of civil unrest stalks our programming communities.

Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today

Simon Willison20241,003 points467 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details

One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, …

Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

John Cutler20201,002 points281 commentsCareer & Management details

(Note: This was written in 2016. I recently — in late 2019 — wrote a post about some things I’ve learned since then .)

Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

In my recent analysis of YouTube’s information density I included the results from an advanced statistical analysis on the number of videos present on the home page, which projected that around May 2026 there would only be one lonely video on the home screen.

I'm OK being left behind, thanks

Terence Eden20261,000 points765 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre…

Firefox Was Always Enough

Ian Bicking20201,000 points586 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details

There are many concerns about Mozilla right now, and reason to be concerned. While I am no longer with Mozilla, it’s still a place that supported me for many years; I believe in Mozilla and want the project to succeed.

Heuristics that almost always work

Scott Alexander20221,000 points520 commentscited by 14Life, Learning & Writing details

...

First they came for the Iranians

Scott Aaronson20171,000 points429 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details

Action Item: If you’re an American academic, please sign the petition against the Immigration Executive Order. (There are already more than eighteen thousand signatories, including Nobel Laur…

What Gödel Discovered

Stepan Parunashvili20201,000 points319 commentsMath & Algorithms details

In 1931, a 25-year-old Kurt Gödel wrote a proof that turned mathematics upside down. The implication was so astounding, and his proof so elegant that it was...kind of funny. I wanted to share his discovery with you. Fair warning though, I’m not a mathematician; I’m a programmer. This means my understanding is…

Visualizing Attention, a Transformer's Heart [video]

Demystifying attention, the key mechanism inside transformers and LLMs.

How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

Mike Stay2020998 points198 commentsCrypto & Blockchain details

Story time! Around twenty years ago, I was working as a reverse-engineer and cryptanalyst for AccessData while getting my Physics degree at BYU. It was the late 90s and early 2000s. The US governme…

I was asked to crack a program in a job interview

The Decline of Usability

Datagubbe2020996 points971 commentsDesign & UX details

If you find this text interesting, please consider also reading The Decline of Usability: Revisited or some of my other many ramblings on modern user interfaces.

When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

Freaking Rectangle2022996 points543 commentsCareer & Management details

When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly…

An Open Letter to Intel

Thanks for putting a version of MINIX inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world. I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn't even know until I read a press…

Printing Music with CSS Grid

Cruncher2024996 points82 commentsWeb & Frontend details

Music notation should be as accessible and as fluid as text is on the web. CSS Grid helps us get there.

Who's afraid of Chinese models?

Ben Thompson2026995 points910 commentscited by 5AI & Machine Learning details

Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives.

Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords

where my words occasionally escape /dev/null

Nvidia won, we all lost

Sebin Nyshkim2025995 points571 commentsTech Industry & Business details

Since the disastrous launch of the RTX 50 series, NVIDIA has been unable to escape negative headlines: scalper bots are snatching GPUs away from consumers before official sales even begin, power connectors continue to melt, with no fix in sight, marketing is becoming increasingly deceptive, GPUs are missing processing…

I want a computer that I own

Hang on to Your Firefox

Newsonaut2026994 points537 commentsWeb & Frontend details

According to Wikipedia , it’s an adage that goes back to 1512 in Germany. People have known for hundreds of years that you should be careful not to throw out a good and vital thing in your zeal to get rid of a minor annoyance.

The window trick of Las Vegas hotels

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In defense of the Google chef

Rondam Ramblings2011994 points188 commentsTech Industry & Business details

I'm on the road with very limited internet connectivity so I can't do the homework I normally would before posting this, so it's possible th...

Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

A blog

AI winter is well on its way

Filip Piekniewski2018993 points492 commentscited by 3AI & Machine Learning details

Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to

Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more

Mark Jason Dominus2025993 points449 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details

From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus

The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018

Dave Kerr2018993 points441 commentsSoftware Engineering details

Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.