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OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)

www.peereboom.us Essays & writing Essays & articles Web & internet Candidate

Resurfaced independently across 4 calendar years, with breakout response in 2 of them.

submissions
4
submitters
4
observed span
2010–2020
peak thread · 180 comments
212 pts
latest 20+ return · 2014-04-08
212 pts

Submission timeline

2007–2026

One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.

First comments on top threads

HN comment order

I've done quite a bit of programming with the OpenSSL library and this article is only scratching the surface of the awfulness. Documentation is horrible to non-existent, you really do need to go spelunking into the source to figure out how things work, and the code really is that horrible. The worst thing is that error reporting is not consistent - sometimes -1 means error, other times 0 means error, other times 0 means success, and sometimes it's a combination…

agwa·212-point thread·

I have had this experience many times when I tried to use a library where every function was tailored for a very specific concrete situation. The perfect example here is finding an extremely complicated mass of code to read a cert from a file, but no way to read a cert from any other source, not even from a buffer in memory. So if you read it from some other location, or read it from a file yourself, or constructed…

dkarl·115-point thread·

The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.

Breakout years
2

100+ points or 50+ comments

Total points
331

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Total comments
237

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Every submission

DateTitle as submittedByPointsComments
2010-09-10OpenSSL is written by monkeysFirst breakoutdfox11557
2013-09-07[2009] OpenSSL is written by monkeyscramforce20
2014-04-08OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)Best thread · Latest 20+ point returndptee212180
2020-04-09OpenSSL Is Written by Monkeys (2009)mmm_grayons20