Best of 2017

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

Software Engineering
1382

Bootstrapping a Type System (2010)

Magpie has reached a strange but neat little milestone on the road from “weird experiment” to “real language”: the type system is now bootstrapped. I’m not aware of any other languages where a statement like that is even meaningful (maybe Typed Scheme ?), much less true , so I’ll try to break that down.

1397

Implementing VisiCalc (2003)

I'm writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum's The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I'm also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember…

1402

Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room…

1406

The Aggregate Magic Algorithms (2015)

There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…

1409

The qmail security guarantee

Of course, ``security hole in qmail'' does not include problems outside of qmail: for example, NFS security problems, TCP/IP security problems, DNS security problems, bugs in scripts run from .forward files, and operating system bugs generally. It's silly to blame a problem on qmail if the system was already…