Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 57 posts.

Networking & Internet
33

The network is reliable

I’ve been discussing Jepsen and partition tolerance with Peter Bailis over the past few weeks, and I’m honored to present this post as a collaboration between the two of us. We’d also like to extend our sincere appreciation to everyone who contributed their research and experience to this piece.

37

Why no curl 8

In this little piece I'll explain why there won't be any version 8 of curl and libcurl in a long time. I won't rule out that it might happen at some point in the future. Just that it won't happen anytime soon and explain the reasons why. Seven point twenty nine, really? We've done 29 … Continue reading Why no curl 8 →

50

Where did all the HTTP referrers go?

Good (and bad news): the general consensus in the web developer community is that any and every website should be HTTPS by default. Why? HTTP by itself isn't encrypted, leaving it open to eavesdropping, message tampering, and man-in-the-middle attacks. HTTPS, if you use it consistently , prevents these issues.

57

Comcast caught hijacking web traffic

On November 20th, 2012 Comcast hijacked my HTTP traffic and re-routed it through their own servers, injecting a “notice” on the page before completing the request. What this means is instead of my web request being routed to the website I wanted to visit, Comcast took it upon themselves to hijack my web…