Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 780 posts.

Software Engineering
155

The Path to Rust

About six months ago, I started my first large-scale Rust-based project. I’d dabbled with the language in its early days, but back then it was a different beast, and not particularly approachable. I decided to try again, and I’m glad I did. Rust is quickly becoming my favorite language for all systems work (which is…

160

Git Undo

Tell me if you recognize this scenario: you’re in the middle of rewriting your local commits when you suddenly realize that you have gone too far and, after one too many rebases, you are left with a history that looks nothing like the way you wanted. No? Well, I certainly do. It was in one of those moments of despair…

162

Programming blogs

This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to everyone). So…

169

Curl Security Audit

"the overall impression of the state of security and robustness of the cURL library was positive." I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing … Continue…

175

How to do distributed locking

As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…

180

Coding without Google

Back in 2016, an intriguing article appeared on Reddit: “Do Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently?”. The author discussed if expert programmers use google more often than novice coders. He mentioned that using google is a good thing. It helps to find the best solutions, validate ideas, speed the development…