Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 1,031 posts.

Software Engineering
94

Biggest image in the smallest space

What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…

96

A Good Vimrc

There are tons of tutorials such as this one on the internet that contain all kinds of awesome hacks to make your Vim better, but the absolute worst way to make your environment better is to just copy it wholesale from others.

99

The Unix Philosophy

The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.

113

Neon: Node plus Rust

If you’re a JavaScript programmer who’s been intrigued by Rust’s hack without fear theme—making systems programming safe and fun—but you’ve been waiting for inspiration, I may have something for you! I’ve been working on Neon, a set of APIs and tools for making it super easy to write native Node modules in Rust.