11th August 2023 - Link Blog
Shamir Secret Sharing (via) Cracking war story from Max Levchin about the early years of PayPal, in which he introduces an implementation of Shamir Secret Sharing to encrypt their master payment credential table... and then finds that the 3-of-8 passwords needed to decrypt it and bring the site back online don’t appear to work.
Recent articles
- Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments - 21st March 2026
- Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty - 19th March 2026
- GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52 - 17th March 2026