Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 616 posts.

Security & Privacy
151

Saved by Alice

In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. This 2014 decision has significantly reduced the harm caused by vague and overbroad software patents. Before Alice, patent owners who had...

159

Hacker, Hack Thyself

We’ve read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if there

164

How Adversarial Attacks Work

Emil Mikhailov is the founder of XIX.ai [http://XIX.ai] (YC W17). Roman Trusov is a researcher at XIX.ai. Recent studies by Google Brain have shown that any machine learning classifier can be tricked to give incorrect predictions, and with a little bit of skill, you can get them to give pretty much any result you…

167

Switching from 1Password to Bitwarden

I've been using an OpenBSD laptop as my workstation a lot more lately, probably because most of my hardware just works now and I don't have to think too much about it. The touchpad works when I touch it, I can be confident that when I close the lid, the laptop will fully suspend and then fully resume again when I open…