Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 4,838 posts.

Any topic
1052

Attorney General Barr and Encryption

Last month, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy­—what is commonly known as “going dark.” Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically…

1060

Infectious Executable Stacks

In software development there are many concepts that at first glance seem useful and sound, but, after considering the consequences of their implementation and use, are actually horrifying. Examples include thread cancellation , variable length arrays , and memory aliasing . GCC’s closure extension to C is another…

1070

Modern C++ Won't Save Us

I’m a frequent critic of memory unsafe languages, principally C and C++, and how they induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities. My conclusion, based on reviewing evidence from numerous large software projects using C and C++, is that we need to be migrating our industry to memory safe by default…