Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 1,357 posts.

Software Engineering
1097

Modeling Adversaries with TLA+

A common question I get about specs is how to model bad actors. Usually this is one of two contexts: The spec involves several interacting agents sharing a protocol, but some of the nodes are faulty or malicious: they will intentionally try to subvert the system. The spec involves an agent subject to outside forces…

1102

PHP 5 and 7.0 end of life

Critical PHP Security Release 21 Oct 2026: PHP released emergency patches on 21 October 2026 for two critical unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) Learn why PHP EOL matters, the security & compliance risks of running unsupported PHP, and how to plan, test, and upgrade to supported versions.