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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,863 posts.

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12730

Free Public WiFi

Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student I was not prepared to pay in excess of $15 a day for the internet. As I…

12741

Don't trust me: I might be a spook

But the latest revelations scare me. It's one thing to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software; there's a lot of software out there which was written by developers with very little understanding of cryptography or software security, and it shows. If you care about security, we reasoned, stick to software written…

12747

AWS Application Load Balancer

We launched Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for AWS in the spring of 2009 (see New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch to see just how far AWS has come since then). Elastic Load Balancing has become a key architectural component for many AWS-powered applications. In…

12749

16 Things

We don’t invest in themes; we invest in special founders with breakthrough ideas. Which means we don’t make investments based on a pre-existing thesis about a category. That said, here are a few of the things we’ve been observing or thinking about; we’re especially grateful to our founders/companies, and the…

12750

Git at any scale

Hosting Git repositories at scale is a nightmare. When Linus Torvalds designed the first version of the information manager from hell (that's actually the tagline for Git, look it up ), he had a very specific use case in mind: his own. He wanted to replace BitKeeper, the distributed version control system that was…