Best of 2017

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

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663

Terminal and shell performance

There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…

672

Curl’s backdoor threat

-- "Have you ever detected anyone trying to add a backdoor to curl?" -- "Have you ever been pressured by an organization or a person to add suspicious code to curl that you wouldn't otherwise accept?" -- "If a crime syndicate would kidnap your family to force you to comply, what backdoor would you be … Continue…

679

On Conference Speaking

I’ve seen quite a bit of the world thanks to being invited to speak at conferences. Since some people are under the impression that serial conference speakers possess some special talents, I’d like to demystify my process by walking you through my latest talk from start to finish.

682

Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code

Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were…