Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 1,020 posts.

Software Engineering
347

No Easter Eggs in Curl

Easter egg; noun: An unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a joke or a bonus. There are no Easter eggs in curl. For the good. I've been asked about this many times. Among the enthusiast community, people seem to generally like the concept of Easter eggs and hidden treasures, ……

350

js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.

js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read. Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding. Also known as, if it’s not curlable, it’s not on…

353

Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers

Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new service will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This “HAS” data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding. To work with this…