My Livecoding.tv account deletion saga
Update 3, Nov 2 2015 (PM): Well, it’s been…strange. First, it seems my account was finally deleted by Livecoding.tv (thank you!) After being up all night with libel posted all over it, hours after Jamie Green (the other Livecoding co-founder) and Sam Altman (Y Combinator president) replied to the Hacker News thread…
The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared
Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions...
VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GNU General Public…
If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear
Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date.
Bootstrap 4 alpha
Today is a special day for Bootstrap. Not only is it our fourth birthday, but after a year of development, we're finally shipping the first alpha release of…
Welcome Peter
Edit: Peter Thiel is no longer affiliated with Y Combinator. I’m delighted to announce Peter Thiel is joining YC as one of the (now 10!) part-time partners. In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies…
“Citizenfour” Awarded Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014
CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras' riveting documentary about Edward Snowden's efforts to shed light on gross surveillance abuses by the United States government and its partners, just won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Tonight's Oscar win recognizes not only the incredible...
Researchers Could Have Uncovered Volkswagen’s Emissions Cheat If Not for DMCA
Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission. We’ve explained before how this allows manufacturers to prevent competition in the markets for add-on technologies and repair tools. It also makes it harder for watchdogs to…
Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?
It's Time to Break Up the NSA (2014)
The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission—protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies—has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era. Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the…
Io.js 1.0.0
Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.
Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet
Facebook's Internet.org project, which offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global digital divide should be...
How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative…
Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
Modern work can be frustrating and chaotic—if you don’t have the right tools. From context engineering to multimodal search, go behind the scenes and hear how Dropbox engineers are building AI that actually understands you, so you can focus on the work that matters most.
A Designer's War on Misleading Parking Signs
The story of a girl who got too many parking tickets, and dared to dream of a better tomorrow.
Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat
I feel it’s time to revisit the web vs. native debate, and concede defeat — or, at least, concede that the web cannot, and should not , compete with native when it comes to complex, app-like structures.
Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads
Please note: our followup analysis of 3.4.0-rc3 revealed additional faults in MongoDB’s replication algorithms which could lead to the loss of acknowledged documents–even with Majority Write Concern, journaling, and fsynced writes.
The best icon is a text label
Icons are an essential part of many user interfaces. The thing is: more often than not, they break clarity. Just replace them by a text label. Or an icon plus label.