Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 278 posts.

Systems & Performance
96

HFS+ Bit Rot

HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…

108

LibreSSL's PRNG is Unsafe on Linux

The first version of LibreSSL portable, 2.0.0, was released a few days ago (followed soon after by 2.0.1 ). Despite the 2.0.x version numbers, these are only preview releases and shouldn't be used in production yet, but have been released to solicit testing and feedback. After testing and examining the codebase, my…

113

Will It Optimize? (2010)

See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…