Best of 2016

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

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2701

FreeRTOS meets Rust

The Rust ecosystem has made some cool progress on the embedded development front since my last article . Let’s take a look how we can build a much more ergonomical and safe API to one of the more popular real time operating systems - FreeRTOS - with a full testing and continous integration setup.

2705

The Controversial State of JavaScript Tooling

There have been many different blog posts on the “State of the Web” , problems people face around tooling, and similar-style musings of late. This article is about summarizing my thoughts on recent events. Rather than yet another rant about the state of web development, this piece aims to pour some thought into what…

2707

Whatsapp: Video Calling

Our goal at WhatsApp has always been to help as many people as possible stay in touch with friends, family, and others they care about. That means making a product that’s simple, easy to use, and accessible no matter where you are. We started with messaging and Group Chat. Then we added voice calling. And we did it in…

2709

Hard Forks

The crypto-currency Ethereum completed a hard fork on Wednesday. The Ethereum core developers, after getting a vote of support from the Ethereum community, hard forked Ethereum to “get back” the roughly $40mm of Ethereum that was taken in the hack of The DAO. Hard forks are a bit of a lightning rod issue in the […]

2718

Ideas for Game Clones to Code (2012)

So you know a little bit about programming (perhaps you've read the free book, "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" , a free programming book for beginners whose author shamelessly plugs at every chance) but you want to get better at coding. You can't seem to find any open source projects that are at your…

2719

Hotpatching a C Function on x86

In this post I’m going to do a silly, but interesting, exercise that should never be done in any program that actually matters. I’m going write a program that changes one of its function definitions while it’s actively running and using that function. Unlike last time , this won’t involve shared libraries, but it will…

2727

You Can't Always Hash Pointers in C

Occasionally I’ve needed to key a hash table with C pointers. I don’t care about the contents of the object itself — especially if it might change — just its pointer identity. For example, suppose I’m using null-terminated strings as keys and I know these strings will always be interned in a common table. These…