Best of 2009

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2009. 1,420 posts.

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241

Google Wave's Scrollbars

In spite of some of the reaction to it , I find Google Wave to be surprisingly useful. One thing I don't really understand, though, is its scrollbars. They behave quite differently from regular scrollbars, and I can't discern any overwhelming advantages of Google's implementation. It seems I'm not alone. The…

253

Cryptographic Right Answers

Encrypting data: Use AES in CTR (Counter) mode, and append an HMAC . AES is about as standard as you can get, and has done a good job of resisting cryptologic attacks over the past decade. Using CTR mode avoids the weakness of ECB mode, the complex (and bug-prone) process of padding and unpadding of partial blocks (or…