Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 3,497 posts.

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3432

Documents ≠ Programs

I've recently become active again on twtxt.net , the platform that puts the "social" in "anti-social social media". There is a lot of intelligent discussion to be had there, and for the past couple days a discussion has been going on about technology buzzwords and, later, unnecessary complexity on websites. I was…

3437

Introduction to WebAssembly Components

WebAssembly and WASI show great promise for the future of computing outside the browser, and the WebAssembly component model aims to improve the portability, cross-language, and composition story for Wasm. This article explains the goals of the component model, and showcases how to use tooling from the Bytecode…

3441

Riding the Writing Wave

“Writing is its own reward.” – Henry Miller Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates new ones. Writing forces you to think. It’s nature’s way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is. The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are

3445

; Echo “Shell Injection”

This is an introductory article about shell injection, a security vulnerability allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user's machine. This is a well-studied problem, and there are simple and efficient solutions to it. It's relatively easy to design library API in such a way as to shield the application…

3446

The Secret History of ATAPI

The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press…

3449

When can glibc be built with Clang?

Updated in 2026: glibc 2.43 added experimental support for building with Clang. In September 2021, I wrote "So, dear glibc, will you be happy with my sending Clang patches?" in Build glibc with LLD 13. We have come to a turning point. In Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, at the glibc Birds of a Feather session, I asked…