Top all-time · #9248
François Best
Personal blog · francoisbest.com/posts · on HN as franky47programmingweb
François Best's personal blog at francoisbest.com covers programming and web. Since 2020, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Show HN: Horcrux, a Playground for Shamir Secret Sharing”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link François Best's interactive posts and tools, including the hashvatars post on generating avatars from SHA-256 hashes and the Horcrux playground for Shamir Secret Sharing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Freelance web developer and open-sourcerer.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: Horcrux, a Playground for Shamir Secret Sharing3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-02-24
- Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-04-20
- Password Reset for End-to-End Encrypted Applications (2020)2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-05-19
What Hacker News says?
I wrote some ideas on how to implement a password reset for end-to-end encrypted apps, reviews and comments are welcome: https://francoisbest.com/posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-...
Comment linking /posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-apps
on “Notion for everyone”Submitted Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars as a story · 198 points
HN discussionAn alternative way to restore access to an E2EE app account could involve Shamir's Secret Sharing, I wrote some ideas about it would work: https://francoisbest.com/posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-...
Comment linking /posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-apps
on “Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature”Submitted Show HN: Horcrux, a Playground for Shamir Secret Sharing as a story · 151 points
HN discussionThese are really cool, especially Beam as others have said. It's not quite the same but I came across a really cool interactive blog post doing something similar recently that others might enjoy: https://francoisbest.com/posts/2021/hashvatars
Comment linking /posts/2021/hashvatars
on “Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars”Submitted Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars as a story · 143 points
HN discussionThat was my initial thought as well. I wrote about how to use Shamir's Secret Sharing (with a similar Horcrux analogy) to reset master passwords for end-to-end encrypted applications (such as password managers): https://francoisbest.com/posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-...
Comment linking /posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-apps
on “Double Blind Passwords a.k.a. Horcruxing”Submitted Dotenv Is Dead as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOne cool aspect of Shamir's Secret Sharing is you can set any threshold for how many fragments are required to recover the secret. This reduces the risk of one losing the secret due to fragments being lost. The scheme also has perfect secrecy, so gaining a few fragments, but not the threshold amount, gives an attacker no information about the secret. https://francoisbest.com/horcrux
Comment linking /horcrux
on “Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow”Submitted The Security of GitHub Actions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSuggestion: shave off two bits, and switch between the variants in the "A bit of fun" section: https://francoisbest.com/posts/2021/hashvatars#a-bit-of-fun
Comment linking /posts/2021/hashvatars
on “Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars”Submitted Password Reset for End-to-End Encrypted Applications (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionjust go to https://francoisbest.com/horcrux and set Number needed to 10. It blows up
Comment linking /horcrux
on “Show HN: Horcrux, a Playground for Shamir Secret Sharing”Submitted Testing against every Next.js canary release as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOne of my first blog posts was about a similar system, though much simpler/naive and based on trusting an email address to distribute shards. Its failure point boiled down to letting the user save the other shard. Maybe a 3-shard scheme could help redundancy and loss tolerance. https://francoisbest.com/posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-...
Comment linking /posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-apps
on “Juicebox: Squeezing the hassle out of encryption key recovery”Submitted Displaying Local Times in Next.js as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK | Remote only (TZ: Europe/Paris) Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, React, Fastify, ChakraUI, TailwindCSS. Full stack web developer with preference on front-end and a keen eye on design. Privacy-focused projects are where I shine. Don't contact me if you give money to Facebook. Email: contact+freelance@francoisbest.com Site: https://francoisbest.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2021)”Submitted Storing React State in the URL with Next.js as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLocation: Grenoble, France Remote: yes, exclusively Willing to relocate: no Technologies: TypeScript, Next.js, React, Node.js, Fastify, Prisma, Rust, PostgreSQL, Redis. Résumé/CV: https://francoisbest.com#career Email: hireme@francoisbest.com I'm a fullstack web developer with a keen eye for design, and a passion for privacy and cryptography (not the kind used in finance). I also have a freelancing business, but ope…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2023)”Submitted Reading files on Vercel during Next.js ISR as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI also publish a list of (subjectively) interesting articles, most of which come from the HN newsletter: https://francoisbest.com/reading-list
Comment linking /reading-list
on “I don't know how to browse the internet anymore”Submitted Representing SHA-256 Hashes as Avatars as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt can be seen better in the playground: https://francoisbest.com/hashvatar (I'm the author)
Comment linking /hashvatar
on “Generating SVG Avatars from Identifiers”Submitted Password Reset for End-to-End Encrypted Applications as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIn the intro, this post is referenced https://francoisbest.com/posts/2021/hashvatars
Comment linking /posts/2021/hashvatars
on “Generating SVG Avatars from Identifiers”Submitted Mobile Device Frames for Excalidraw as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK | Grenoble, France | Remote only Technologies: TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js, Chakra-UI, Fastify, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Keystone.js, Prisma, GraphQL, Libsodium. Resumé/CV: https://francoisbest.com/#career Email: freelance.hn@francoisbest.com Availability: up to mid-October.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2023)”Submitted Dark Mode for Excalidraw as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMy personal website is a web laboratory. It's where I'm the most at ease with the stack, where I have everything I need to brew ideas [0] and test out projects [1] before they become an entity of their own. Building in public compounds on the rest of the website. [0] https://francoisbest.com/e2ee/encrypt [1] https://francoisbest.com/repoverview
Comment linking /repoverview
on “The Value of a Personal Site”Another interesting approach is the one used in ProtonMail, using the SessionVars trick by Thomas Frank. It combines in-memory storage for XSS safety, and a combination of SessionStorage and `window.name` to split the token into secret random parts, each taking its separate channel, to ensure the token survives a page reload. I wrote about the details on how it works [1] and packed a TypeScript implementation on NPM…
Comment linking /posts/2019/how-to-store-e2ee-keys-in-the-browser
on “How to Store Session Tokens in a Browser (and the Impacts of Each)”