Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 5,273 posts.

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1864

LLVM-powered devirtualization

Virtualization is a powerful technique for code obfuscation, and reversing it can be challenging. In this post, we cover the work done during an internship on developing an automated devirtualization tool. We explore a simplified taint-based approach and discuss its limitations. For a more in-depth analysis, the full…

1874

Lisp: Icing or Cake?

The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 ended one week ago. 48 games were submitted, a new record for the jam! This past week has been a time for participants to play and rate each other’s games. As I explored the entries, I noticed two distinct meta-patterns in how people approached building games with Lisp. I think these…

1886

40 Years of Programming

In April, 1984, my father bought a computer for his home office, a Luxor ABC-802 , with a Z80 CPU, 64 kilobytes of RAM, a yellow-on-black screen with 80 by 25 text mode, or about 160 by 75 pixels in graphics mode, and two floppy drives. It had BASIC in its ROM, and came with absolutely no games. If I wanted to play…