Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,337 posts.

Security & Privacy
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3331

Volkswagen and Cheating Software

Portuguese translation by Ricardo R Hashimoto For the past six years, Volkswagen has been cheating on the emissions testing for its diesel cars. The cars’ computers were able to detect when they were being tested, and temporarily alter how their engines worked so they looked much cleaner than they actually were. When…

3345

Memory safety absolutists

When seeing the title of this post, I bet in some people's minds, the first thought was "Rust devs!". This connection is not unfounded. Rust devs tend to be passionate about memory safety. Some of it, I'm sure, may have been caused by a classic language wars attitude: my language is better than yours, and here is why…

3350

Ad-tech is fascist tech

A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:

3357

Brute Force Incognito Browsing

Both Firefox and Chrome have a feature for creating temporary private browsing sessions. Firefox calls it Private Browsing and Chrome calls it Incognito Mode . Both work essentially the same way. A temporary browsing session is started without carrying over most existing session state (cookies, etc.), and no state…