Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 4,414 posts.

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3661

Emacs Bytecode Internals (2014)

Byte-code compilation is an underdocumented — and in the case of the recent lexical binding updates, undocumented — part of Emacs. Most users know that Elisp is usually compiled into a byte-code saved to .elc files, and that byte-code loads and runs faster than uncompiled Elisp. That’s all users really need to know…

3664

I'm Writing a Book on Security

I’m writing a book on security in the highly connected Internet-of-Things world. Tentative title: Click Here to Kill Everybody Peril and Promise in a Hyper-Connected World There are two underlying metaphors in the book. The first is what I have called the World-Sized Web, which is that combination of mobile, cloud…

3669

Wrong signal

In recent months, privacy and civil rights activists have increasingly recommended the use of Signal [1] , an instant messenger app developed by Open Whisper Systems (OWS). After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in particular, many tweets recommended using hard disk encryption and the ostensibly…

3670

Amazon EC2 Beta (2006)

Innovation never takes a break, and neither do I. From the steaming hot beaches of Cabo San Lucas I would like to tell you about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, now open for limited beta testing, with more beta slots to open soon. Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing […]

3671

LeftPad and Go: can tooling help?

You’ve probably heard that story about NPM community and LeftPad package, that broke thousands JavaScript projects worldwide. There was a nice follow-up article titled “Have We Forget How To Program” and one guy even created left-pad.io - Left-Pad As A Service web service. People got a lot of fun discussing this story.

3690

MitM-ing Postgres

I recently had to set up a new postgres instance at work. While we’re already using Heroku Postgres for production loads, we had some requirements for this one that couldn’t be solved without being database admin, and thus had to go self-hosted. That...