Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 1,304 posts.

Software Engineering
305

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…

311

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…

327

500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format

Haiku uses a custom vector image format to store icons. This is surprising both because most OSes consider bitmaps to be totally sufficient to represent icons and because there are plenty of vector graphics formats out this (e.g. SVG). The goal of the Haiku Vector Icon Format (HVIF) is to make vector icon files as…

328

Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X

In January, we open-sourced ChakraCore, the core of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge and Universal Windows Platform. We expressed our ambition to bring our best-in-class, but Windows-only, JavaScript engine to other platforms, with Linux as the prioritized target. Today at NodeSummit, we are…