Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 268 posts.

Security & Privacy
94

Suicide Linux

You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your spelling and runs the command anyway?* Such as when changing directory, or opening a file. I have an idea: Suicide Linux. Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter cr...

109

Maybe Skip SHA-3

In 2005 and 2006, a series of significant results were published against SHA-1 [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]. These repeated break-throughs caused something of a crisis of faith as cryptographers questioned whether we knew how to build hash functions at all. After all, many hash functions from the 1990's had not aged well [ 1 ][ 2…