Best of 2021

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

Software Engineering
842

Life Before Unicode

Unicode definitely added a lot of complexity to string handling, and people who use languages with ASCII alphabets exclusively may think it's unjustified. However, I'm a non-ASCII language speaker who's old enough to remember the alternatives, and the alternatives are far worse than the complexity of Unicode.

860

Emacs Tramp over AWS SSM APIs

Cattle not pets The majority of AWS EC2 I need to operate these days are members of Kubernetes clusters. For remote access to them I’m more commonly authenticating to the Kube API to spawn a privileged ephemeral debugger pod rather than accessing the host directly. I have little need for host access even for the…

862

Go HTTPS Servers with TLS

This post is a basic introduction to running HTTPS servers and clients in Go using TLS. It assumes some familiarity with public-key crypto. Feel free to check out my earlier posts about RSA and the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange ; TLS uses the elliptic-curve version of Diffie-Hellman. I won't be covering how the protocol…

864

Prefix sum on portable compute shaders

This is a followup to my previous post, prefix sum on Vulkan. Last year, I got a fancy algorithm for this problem running well on one device. This time, I will dive into the question of how to make it work well across a wide range of devices. The short answer is, it can be made to work pretty portably on Vulkan and…