Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 3,400 posts.

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573

Quora in the next YC batch

This month, YC will be participating in Quora’s most recent investment round and Quora will be joining this summer’s YC batch. This is a new experiment for us; we’ve funded later-stage companies before, but none close to Quora’s stage. Our hope is that both the company and the YC community will get a lot of value out…

576

We've Open-Sourced Everything

CodeCombat is a programming game for learning to code [https://blog.codecombat.com/180000-child-programmers-versus-44-ogres]; a multiplayer coding challenge arena [https://blog.codecombat.com/beat-this-level-get-a-programming-job] for sharpening your skills; a Y-Combinator-funded…

583

Comments on the Sony Hack

I don’t have a lot to say about the Sony hack, which seems to still be ongoing. I want to highlight a few points, though. At this point, the attacks seem to be a few hackers and not the North Korean government. (My guess is that it’s not an insider, either.) That we live in the world where we aren’t sure if any given…

593

Zeroing buffers is insufficient

With a bit of care and a cooperative compiler, we can zero a buffer — but that's not what we need. What we need to do is zero every location where sensitive data might be stored. Remember, the whole reason we had sensitive information in memory in the first place was so that we could use it; and that usage almost…