Best of 2016

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

Software Engineering
946

Rust via its Core Values

I have a couple of ideas about learning programming languages. The first is that we do it wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You try learning a new language and can’t quite see how it all works. Why do I use this syntax here and some other syntax over here? We get frustrated by all the weird bits and go back to…

952

The One Second Dash

The Amazon Dash is a $5 WiFi button that summons a truck to deliver you water or other stuff. Want your Dash to do something else? The popular approach is to sniff its ARP requests. This requires that Dash connect to your network, putting you perilously close to having some DUDE delivered with your IoT mood lighting.

956

Why OCaml? [video]

Here’s a post from a talk I gave this last summer during our internship program about why we use OCaml. It spends a lot of time on how OCaml fits into the space of programming language designs, and why we think OCaml is in a real sweet spot in that design space, especially for the kind of work we do at Jane Street.