Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 6,299 posts.

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4833

Service mesh use cases (2020)

Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble…

4846

The XML spec is 25 years old today

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML…

4855

Code the shortest path first

There is a strange thing that I noticed as I progressed from a junior engineer to mid-career to senior. When you’re a new engineer, still learning the basics, you are given a task or you have an idea, and you proceed to implement exactly that idea. Very simple, point A to point B, whatever gets the job done. You hate…

4860

Writing Linux Modules in Ada (2016)

In the following series of blog posts I will document my attempts to write Linux modules using the Ada language. In part 1, I will demonstrate how to write in Ada and build a simple "hello world" Linux kernel module. Additionally, I will introduce a basic customized Ada runtime to support our "hello world" module…