Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 498 posts.

Systems & Performance
136

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…

144

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…

150

The TTY demystified (2008)

The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user.