Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 3,290 posts.

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3273

Staff archetypes

Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…

3278

Android | Madaidan's Insecurities

By default, Android has a strong security model and incorporates full system SELinux policies , strong app sandboxing , full verified boot , modern exploit mitigations like fine-grained, forward-edge Control Flow Integrity and ShadowCallStack , widespread use of memory-safe languages (Java / Kotlin) and more. As such…

3282

Making sure you're not a bot!

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

3285

Revisiting a 'smaller Rust'

A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…

3286

Firefox and Chromium

Firefox is sometimes recommended as a supposedly more secure browser because of its parent company's privacy practices. This article explains why this notion is not true and enumerates a number of security weaknesses in Firefox's security model when compared to Chromium. In particular, it covers the less granular…