Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 248 posts.

Web & Frontend
123

WebAssembly Raytracer

While teaching a web development class, I wanted to present some benchmarks that show the performance benefits of asm.js as well as WebAssembly. I was unfortunately not able to find a suitable reference. Therefore, I implemented a simplistic raytracer in JavaScript as well as in C++ with a similar code structure while…

127

Windows 3.1 All Over Again

Reactive programming and thread sharing. Javascript, Node.js, Go, Rails, Elixir and Erlang. Rewind the clocks to Windows 3.1 In 1992 with Windows 3.1 we had this thing non-preemptive multitasking, i.e. “Cooperative Multitasking”. Cooperation is a funny term, it should actually be “Programmer Controlled Multitasking”…

132

Firefox Quantum

Next week, Mozilla will release Firefox 57. Also referred to as Firefox Quantum, from the project name we've used for all the work that has been put into making this the most awesome Firefox release ever. This is underscored by the fact that I've gotten mailed release-swag for the first time during my four years ……

143

Why I moved from Angular to React

The article should help people to understand the benefits of React and Angular for making an educated decision to choose between Angular or React. It tells my story why I moved from Angular to React after using both libraries for years. It's not just another click-bait article, but an article with lots of experiences…

145

Foolproof HTML

I've been thinking and prototyping a native HTML editor for a while⁺ . (Native as opposed to a text editor that's customized to work with HTML) This is a rough transcript of a presentation I gave on the subject in 2016. This presentation is about HTML, but these ideas could be useful for other markup languages, data…