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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,961 posts.

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2026
4445

WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?

OpenSSL sucks. The BoringSSL and AWS-LC forks are Googled and Amazoned to death; they don't care about anyone but their own use cases. I can't remember ever having a good experience with software using GnuTLS. LibreSSL is incomplete... FOREWARD This post is about the experience of taking a leap of …

4448

PageRank explained

Picture this, the year is 1996. You find yourself frustrated with the incumbent search engines like AltaVista, which primarily does a content-based search (it'll give you an article on "Hotels for Chickens" if you search "Hotels" because the word matches). There's gotta be a better way, right? Well, in hindsight, of…

4461

Alice is impatient

Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says that her mean wait time is 1s.

4464

Patching my guitar amp's firmware

I’m having a lot of fun with reverse engineering lately, so when I was looking over the service manual for my guitar amp, a Yamaha THR10c, and saw references to a UART header in the schematic, I got excited. I wondered if anything cool was hiding in there. Next to it was a JTAG header. I knew next to nothing about…

4467

NSA and IETF: Fairness

Secret NSA documents showed that NSA pushed DES in the 1970s to "drive out competitors" while knowing that DES was "weak enough" to break; meanwhile NSA publicly claimed that it would use DES . NSA used export-law exceptions in the 1990s to entrench RC4 and RSA-512, causing security problems for decades . NSA in the…