Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 1,013 posts.

Software Engineering
121

I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

In this article, I will tell how I contributed code to Mozilla during a Bug Squashing Party. I hope to provide some tips and advice about how to start contributing to a Mozilla project (or any other open-source project). I will talk about Firefox and Servo, which, I think, are somehow representative of two common ways…

124

Programming Sucks

E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, 1 [1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

136

Zeroing buffers is insufficient

With a bit of care and a cooperative compiler, we can zero a buffer — but that's not what we need. What we need to do is zero every location where sensitive data might be stored. Remember, the whole reason we had sensitive information in memory in the first place was so that we could use it; and that usage almost…

140

Toward a better programming

When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on…

147

Hints for writing Unix tools

The workaday world of a modern programmer abounds with Unix tools, stitched together in myriad ways. While good tools integrate seamlessly with your own environment, bad ones will constantly frustrate your efforts. Good tools have a seemingly limitless application, constrained only by your own imagination. Bad tools…