Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 526 posts.

Software Engineering
44

A Case of Stolen Source Code

Last week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app HandBrake was compromised . One of the two download servers for HandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the app, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote control of your computer.

50

JSON Feed

We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs. So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects…

59

Tmux and Vim – better together

There are numerous benefits of using tmux. The benefits I discussed there are independent of one’s choice of text editor. But if you’re a vim user, the benefits of tmux reach even further. One of the best aspects of tmux is that it unlocks the potential for a more powerful vim-based development environment, allowing…