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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,900 posts.
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Stupid Patent of the Month: Microsoft’s Design Patent on a Slider
For the first time ever, this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is being awarded to a design patent. Microsoft recently sued Corel for, among other things, infringing its patent on a slider, D554,140, claiming that Corel Home Office has infringed Microsoft’s design. The design patent, as detailed...
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ChatGPT, Rot13, and Daniel Kahneman
I thought it would be interesting to see whether ChatGPT could solve some basic ciphers (Caesar, Vignere, etc.). I decided to start at the bottom, with perhaps the easiest possible cipher: rot13. I asked it to decode the rot-13 encoding of “Why did the chicken cross the road”: So the first thing to note here is that…
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Paper sizes
Update Apr 22, 2016: I’ve made a video which explains most of what is in this blogpost:Two standardsYes, this blogpost is about paper. This has absolutely no...
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Someone has been attempting to DDoS us for weeks and we do nothing
Someone has been attempting to DDoS us for weeks now. They have flooded our server with hundreds of millions of requests and attempted to download our setup…
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Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software
In a world of closed platforms, browser extensions are the rare exception that let users modify the apps that we use.
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A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
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Go: Ten years and climbing
Drawing Copyright ©2017 Renee French This week marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of Go. The initial discussion ...
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DEV-0537 targeting organizations for data exfiltration and destruction
The activity we have observed has been attributed to a threat group that Microsoft tracks as DEV-0537, also known as LAPSUS$. DEV-0537 is known for using a pure extortion and destruction model without deploying ransomware payloads.
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Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1
After posting my reaction to clause 3.3.1 of the iPhone SDK terms I decided to write Steve Jobs the following email:
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Discipline Doesn’t Scale
If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they'd write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who've worked it out. The above statement is true, which is a good thing for those of us interested in improving the state of software and...
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A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is committed to a post-quantum-safe Web PKI. The path we’re planning to take is Merkle Tree Certificates (“MTCs”), a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal. This post is about these plans and why we believe…
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Life, death, and retirement
I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason.My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for b…
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Threat actor abuses Cloudflare tunnels to deliver remote access trojans
Key findings Proofpoint has observed an increase in malware delivery via TryCloudflare Tunnel abuse. The activity is financially motivated and delivers exclusively remote
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Eldar Black Holes
Isaac Asimov, in one of the anthologies he edited, mentioned reading some astronomical news back in the early 1960s about neutron stars. Being a science popularizer as well as a science fiction author, he was inspired to write a science essay about neutron stars. This was read by a few people but then more or less…
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NetBSD 11.0
The NetBSD project is pleased to (finally) announce the NetBSD 11.0 release ! See the release announcement for details.
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Saudi Arabia executes Mustafa al-Darwish for teenage protests
In a statement this morning, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of the Interior announced that Mustafa Hashem al-Darwish has been executed. His family received no advance notice, and found out Mustafa had been executed by reading the news online. Mustafa was arrested in May 2015, and charged with offences related to his…
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The Religion of Speed
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
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Tarsnap price cut
This will no doubt annoy my friends Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek , who for years have been telling me that I should raise Tarsnap's prices. But while Thomas accuses me of running Tarsnap like a public utility rather than a business, and thinks this is a characteristic to be avoided, I see this as a high…
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We Got Accepted into Techstars and Turned Them Down
Yes, we were accepted into one of the nation’s most prestigious accelerator programs and turned them down. So are we crazy? Let us know in the comments.
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How A Pull Request Rocked My World
This is a story about Pull Request
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What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
When software developers write code, they often use tools called IDEs, integrated development environments, that provide contextual information needed to manage the complexity of modern software. What would such a workspace look like, if it were designed for journalism?
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Amazon deletes purchased copies of 1984 from Kindle
Amazon removed purchased e-books from Kindles when a publisher had second thoughts about online distribution.
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Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
For Christmas, I gave my parents this e-ink picture frame (built from an old e-reader) that cycles through photos from a shared iCloud photo album:
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Learning to Learn
The fastest way to get better at something is to start slow.
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A Prototype Original iPod
Now, when we look back, we can pretty clearly see that the iPod was the genesis of a totally different kind of Apple — an Apple willing to enter new markets and make the best version of that new thing. Sure, Apple had made other things before ( QuickTake ! PowerCD !) but they never really felt committed to those…