Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 464 posts.

Web & Frontend
156

What RESTful actually means

If you do web development, you’ve probably heard of REST. But if you’re like me, you usually just pretend to know what it is, and nod politely when someone asks you if what you’re making is RESTful. I use HTTP, err, that means it’s RESTful right? Recently, I decided to take the plunge and actually find out what this…

170

Advancing the realtime web

Over the past few months the team at RethinkDB has been working on a project to make building modern, realtime apps dramatically easier. The upcoming features are the start of an exciting new database access model – instead of polling the database for changes, the developer can tell RethinkDB to continuously push…

172

Writing a website in Rust

I wanted to create a website for a personal project. This is usually the great opportunity to learn - no time pressure, no external requirements, etc. That meant I could choose the language I wanted to try out in anger (Rust) and take it for a spin. Here’s a short summary of the experience.

179

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…