Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 5,820 posts.

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5072

The Dig

As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…

5074

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…

5078

Helping to secure internet routing

The internet works reliably, in large part, on the basis of a key technology called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is a means by which all junction points on the internet (routers) communicate with each other to dynamically establish the correct (and correctly weighted) paths that network packets should follow to…

5082

Resurrecting Fortran

We have finished the first chapter on a long journey of resurrecting Fortran: forming an initial core community of developers and users with enough momentum around the new Fortran website and projects at fortran-lang.org . There is still have a long way to go to, but this was a necessary (although not sufficient)…

5086

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…

5092

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…