Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 1,420 posts.

Software Engineering
430

IOCCC Flight Simulator

The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.

431

Better Compression with Zstandard

I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome . Long story short, a Facebook engineer…

433

Dolphin Emulator Progress Report

A project cannot survive for nearly fourteen years without making some difficult decisions. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but, to be successful you have to learn from each and every one. One of the most difficult decisions made for Dolphin was the deprecation and removal of D3D9 despite it being the…

437

Beginners Guide to Vulkan

Recently I asked the community for beginner-friendly resources on Vulkan, and I compiled a list of them that you can find below. For the beginners reading this, Vulkan is a new graphics API-- in other words, a way to communicate with your GPU and make it do things. It's managed by the Khronos Group, which means it's…

443

How to write a simple operating system

This document shows you how to write and build your first operating system in x86 assembly language. It explains what you need, the fundamentals of the PC boot process and assembly language, and how to take it further. The resulting OS will be very small (fitting into a bootloader) and have very few features, but it's…