Top all-time · #1907
Alexandre Dulaunoy
Personal blog · foo.besecurityprogramming
Alexandre Dulaunoy's personal blog at foo.be covers security and programming. Since 2008, 41 different Hacker News readers have linked it 65 times, most often “Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Personal webpage of Alexandre Dulaunoy - from information security to open source and art
Most-linked posts?
- Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-01-05
- The Fourth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest Results5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-09-13
- Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don't Mix (1997)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-10-24
- Forban - a simple link-local opportunistic p2p free softwar3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-01-12
- OpenPGP really works2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-01
- Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-11-17
What Hacker News says?
Sounds like you're going to have a bad time https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol4_1/tpj0401-0013.html
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol4_1/tpj0401-0013.html
on “Greppability is an underrated code metric”Submitted Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996) as a story · 223 points
HN discussionIn 1998, the EFF and John Gilmore published the book about "Deep Crack" called "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". But at the time, it would have been illegal to publish the code on a web site, or include a CDROM with the book publishing the "Deep Crack" DES cracker source code and VHDL in digital form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker https://www.foo.be/do…
Comment linking /docs/eff-des-cracker/book/crackingdessecre00elec.pdf
on “Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64”Submitted OpenPGP really works as a story · 143 points
HN discussionNo, actually it's not public domain. The 19th edition was printed and released in 2005. Pearson looks like it actively tries to protect it's copyrights to the series as well: http://www.foo.be/docs/TCPIP-Illustrated-1/
Comment linking /docs/TCPIP-Illustrated-1/
on “A fifteen year old TCP bug?”Submitted The Perl Journal as a story · 69 points
HN discussionThe Google Command Line Tool is interesting but it's missing the search (is that intentional from Google? I don't know). I made a quick and dirty one liner replace foo by your search query: curl -s "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&start=0&rsz=large&q=foo" | sed -e 's/[{}]/''/g' | awk '{n=split($0,s,","); for (i=1; i<=n; i++) print s[i]}' | grep -E "("url"|"titleNoFormatting")" | sed -e s/\"…
Comment linking /cgi-bin/wiki.pl/2010-06-19_Searching_Google_From_The_Command_Line
on “Introducing Google Command line Tool”Submitted Morris Worm Decompiled (1988) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionTo me, minifaction will rename reallyClearFunctionName("string param") to a("string param"). While obfuscation would also encrypt the "string param" and then decrypt it at runtime. Minification's main purpose is to reduce the size, obfuscation will go one step futher and make it difficult to understand what is going on. Side note, it can be obfuscated but "maxified" (if that is a thing). Side note: the joke goes tha…
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0017.html
on “The Great Suspender: New maintainer is probably malicious”Submitted Why Do We Need More Wikileaks and Cryptome? as a story · 15 points
HN discussionJS name was based on Java. Pure marketing name. Launched by Netscape with Sun approval (they used to own the trademark, now it is Oracle) in 95. Netscape had money and marketshare. It was adopted by competing browsers (IE in 96, Opera end of 97) and removed alternatives (perl, tcl, python in browsers (eg https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol2_3/tpj0203-0004.html ))
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol2_3/tpj0203-0004.html
on “Rust in the Linux Kernel: Just the Beginning”Submitted Information Leakage from Optical Emanations [pdf] as a story · 8 points
HN discussionVery cool project. There were similar ones done with Perl: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_2/tpj0502-0009.html https://blog.sudobits.com/2012/08/18/perl-linux-a-linux-dist... All of these projects seem to be reaching for an integrated programming language / operating system like the Lisp machines of yore. It was before my time, so I never got to use one, but from what I have read, they were quite amazing to…
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol5_2/tpj0502-0009.html
on “Snakeware – Linux distro with Python userspace inspired by Commodore 64”Submitted Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI remember those... And let's not forget Perl Poetry: http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_1/tpj0501-0012.html
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol5_1/tpj0501-0012.html
on “Ask HN: Why hasn't Perl 6 taken off yet?”Submitted OpenPGP really works as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI was a bioinformatician who worked on the Human Genome Project [ https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html ]. I used perl daily for years. In ~2004(?) I attended a San Francisco Perl Mongers User Group meeting where Randal Schwartz confirmed that Perl6 would sufficiently break backwards compatibility that the CPAN would be started from scratch. I walked out of that meeting and said out loud "oh we…
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html
on “On the Decline of Perl – external factors”Submitted Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don't Mix (1997) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSomewhat related, “How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)” : https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html
on “Perl Data Language: Scientific Computing with Perl”Submitted Forban - a simple link-local opportunistic p2p free softwar as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBioinformatics involves a lot of scripting and loosely coupled pipelines, and at the time of the HGP, there was no experience on how to do this. Here's the story of how Perl become so popular in bioinformatics, and arguably, "How it saved The Human Genome Project"! https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html
on “30 years since the Human Genome Project began – what's next?”Submitted I'm against SOPA... So I'll explain how to make soap with olive oil as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnother interesting bit: "Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don't Mix" If fired, they would have missed their destination by thousands of miles. http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html Note: a maths user error, not a "Perl sucks" rant.
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html
on “The button that isn’t”Submitted How to Choose an Open Source Project for the Long Term as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat about getting some Obfuscated Ruby one-liners, like the well known Perl Obfuscation Contests? https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0017.html :)
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0017.html
on “Ruby One-Liners”Submitted Developing and Utilizing Open Source Solutions Enhances Csirt Capabilities as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNuclear weapons and forgetting parens (in Perl) http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html Also, Castle Bravo was ~3x bigger than predicted because of a failure to correctly model the tritium production from lithium-7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo#Cause_of_high_yie...
Comment linking /docs/tpj/issues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html
on “Some disasters caused by numerical errors”Submitted The Fourth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest Results as a story · 2 points
HN discussionActually, that's what already happened. And now they're trying to do it again. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/attorney_gene... Posted on July 24, 2019 by Bruce Schneier on Security> Yesterday, 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…
Comment linking /docs/eff-des-cracker/book/crackingdessecre00elec.pdf
on “Stop Calling It “Military-Grade Encryption””Submitted Automation and Estimative Language in Information Exchange as a story · 2 points
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