Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 4,763 posts.

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3003

Moving Java Forward Faster

For over twenty years the Java SE Platform and the JDK have evolved in large, irregular, and somewhat unpredictable steps. Each feature release has been driven by one or a few significant features, and so the schedule of each release has been adjusted as needed — sometimes more than once! — in order to accommodate the…

3010

Filesystem error handling

We’re going to reproduce some results from papers on filesystem robustness that were written up roughly a decade ago : Prabhakaran et al. SOSP 05 paper , which injected errors below the filesystem and Gunawi et al. FAST 08 , which looked at how often filesystems failed to check return codes of functions that can…

3022

Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?

Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…

3024

SAFEs are not bad for entrepreneurs

Pascal Levensohn and Andrew Krowne recently published an article: “Why Safe Notes are not safe for entrepreneurs [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/why-safe-notes-are-not-safe-for-entrepreneurs/] .” The authors were critical of the safe, describing it (as the click-bait title suggests), as bad for entrepreneurs. But…

3026

Four DB2 Code Bases?

Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a single code base…