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Brandon Staggs
Personal blog · brandonstaggs.comprogrammingsecurity
Brandon Staggs's personal blog at brandonstaggs.com covers programming and security. Since 2010, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times, most often “Implementing a partial serial number verification system”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts on software license key design, including Partial Key Verification for Delphi apps and generating license keys. Comments cite them as background and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Implementing a partial serial number verification system3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-08-26
- /2007/07/26/implementing-a-partial-serial-number-verification-system-in-delphi/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-30
What Hacker News says?
Given that the application was written in Delphi, I'd bet it's using some form of Partial Key Verification [0], which I wrote a fun blog post about a couple months back [1]. :) [0]: https://www.brandonstaggs.com/2007/07/26/implementing-a-part... [1]: https://keygen.sh/blog/how-to-generate-license-keys-in-2021/
Comment linking /2007/07/26/implementing-a-partial-serial-number-verification-system-in-delphi/
on “Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware”Submitted Implementing a partial serial number verification system as a story · 60 points
HN discussionSeems it depends on your market. I'm doing desktop consumer software, and the licensing is all in-house stuff. Rather than being uncrackable, I'm more focused on usability and keeping honest people honest. I use simple short serial codes, automatically generated & able to be emailed again when customers inevitably lose them. (Try to avoid doing manual generation & manual lookups, it will save you a ton of support ti…
Comment linking /2007/07/26/implementing-a-partial-serial-number-verification-system-in-delphi/
on “Ask HN: Developers who sell desktop software, what do you use for licensing?”Submitted Implementing a Partial Serial Number Verification System in Delphi as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNot sure about web & mobile, but on the desktop Armadillo was a big player: http://www.siliconrealms.com/ Armadillo would handle code generation / management, while e-commerce services with Armadillo support would handle the other half. The downside of any common license system is that it becomes a big target for crackers, since cracking the one system unlocks lots of software. Some developers are happy to deal with…
Comment linking /2007/07/26/implementing-a-partial-serial-number-verification-system-in-delphi/
on “Ask HN: How do you manage license keys in your software?”There are different ways to do it depending on if the client is online or if it has to be offline, and using a dongle or not (Uncommon today). If the client will be online you can just do an API call and check on start, if there's no key show a splash screen with the option of entering a key. If there IS a key, send it (securely) to the API and do something depending on the result. Here's a good article for how you…
Comment linking /2007/07/26/implementing-a-partial-serial-number-verification-system-in-delphi/
on “How to make license keys?”