Founder Ethics
One of the most valuable parts of Y Combinator is our community. As of Summer 2014, we have funded over 1,400 founders, and as the YC family grows, the continued strength of our network depends on founders behaving well. Starting with this batch (YC S14), we’ll be asking founders to review YC’s statement of founder…
How a Light Saber Works
[ Metanote: This explanation arose out of a lunch-time discussion with a colleague who claimed a light saber could not exist since the light beam it emits could not just stop in mid-air after 75 cm. I thank this colleague for the challenge. ]
The Meaning of Life
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
A New Codecademy
Stories, advice, & news from Codecademy
A Shark on the Network
DISCLAIMER: I do not condone monitoring network traffic with intent to spy or otherwise cause harm to people. My interest in the techniques described below is academic. I write in the hope that I can improve Internet security, or at least increase public awareness of vulnerabilities. If you are attempting to replicate…
Levels of Excellence
Over on Google+, a computer scientist at McGill named Artem Kaznatcheev passed on this great description of what it’s like to learn math, written by someone who calls himself ‘man aft…
The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern
TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmente...
Implementing a web server in a single printf() call
A guy just forwarded a joke that most of us will already know Jeff Dean Facts (also here and here). Everytime I read that list, this part stands out: Jeff Dean once implemented a web server in a single printf() call. Other engineers added thousands of lines of explanatory comments but still don't u
Coming soon: Stripe CTF3, distributed systems edition
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
The 2001 agile manifesto was an attempt to replace rigid, process and management heavy, development methodologies with a more human and soft...
No, don't enable revocation checking
Revocation checking is in the news again because of a large number of revocations resulting from precautionary rotations for servers affected by the OpenSSL heartbeat bug. However, revocation checking is a complex topic and there's a fair amount of misinformation around. In short, it doesn't work and you are no more…
IPv6 privacy addresses crashed the MIT CSAIL network
A few hours ago, I sent the following “dear colleagues” email (lightly edited to remove some private details) to all my users at work: This has been a very trying week. For those of you…
Ubuntu and open source help the City of Munich save millions
Challenge Munich is the third-largest city in Germany, with approximately 1.5 million inhabitants. The local governing body employs more than 33,000 people – 16,000 of whom use PCs as part of their daily roles. Those computers are located at different sites and their users have widely differing needs. In 2001, there…
Be Nice Or Leave
We have a sign like this in our beach house. We got it in New Orleans many years ago. I thought of that sign when I was on the phone yesterday. I was talking to a person involved in a deal I’m working on right now. He said “you guys are being awfully nice here.” For […]
How I was able to track the location of any Tinder user
By Max Veytsman At IncludeSec we specialize in application security assessment for our clients, that means taking applications apart and finding really crazy vulnerabilities before other hackers do. When we have time off from client work we like to analyze popular apps to see what we find. Towards the end of 2013 we…
Facebook's Top Open Data Problems
At Meta, research permeates everything we do. We believe the most interesting research questions are derived from real world problems.