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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,615 posts.

Web & Frontend
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3062

I hope WebDAV dies

WebDAV is a file access and transfer protocol created in the 90s. It has support for file locks, arbitrary key-value properties attached to folders, file mimetypes, and many other features that extend this standard. It also has powerful access control features.

3063

Dark corners of Unicode

I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a…

3066

The Pixel Factory

"I think a lot of mathematics is really about how you understand things in your head. It's people that did mathematics, we're not just general purpose machines, we're people. We see things, we feel things, we think of things. A lot of what I have done in my mathematical career has had to do with finding new ways to…

3069

Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

One of the things that came up at the HTTP Workshop was “distributed HTTP” — i.e., moving the Web from a client/server model to a more distributed one. This week, Brewster Khale (of Archive.org fame) talked about similar thoughts on his blog and at CCC. If you haven’t seen that yet, I’d highly suggest watching the…

3076

Backdooring JavaScript using minifier bugs

In addition to unforgettable life experiences and personal growth, one thing I got out of DEF CON 23 was a copy of POC||GTFO 0x08 from Travis Goodspeed. The coolest article I’ve read so far in it is “Deniable Backdoors Using Compiler Bugs,” in which the authors abused a pre-existing bug in CLANG to create a backdoored…

3078

CSS Modules

If you wanted to identify an inflection point in the recent development of CSS thinking, you’d probably pick Christopher Chedeau’s “CSS in JS” talk from NationJS in November, 2014. It was a watershed moment that set a bunch of different minds spiralling off in their own directions like particles after a high-energy…

3086

We're heading for AOL 2.0

Before ‘HTTP’, whenever a new kind of application was invented (say ‘file sharing’, or ‘address book’ or ‘messaging’) someone would sit down with a bunch of others and would discuss this problem at some length. Then they’d draft up a document describing the problem they intended to solve and the protocol layer they…

3087

React Static Site

I built a doubly static site using React (inc react-router) and Webpack. You can see the current demo here on GitHub or continue reading the following post that explains the steps I took during this experiment. This post proves the basic concept and there will be a followup post covering the fine tuning needed to put…