Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.

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4898

How I develop with Nix

Recently NixOS was posted to the Haskell reddit, and seems to have been received well. In the comments I mentioned that NixOS allows me to be a more productive Haskell developer, and I would like to discuss how I am using the features offered by NixOS. Before we get into those details, allow me to briefly summarise…

4902

Starting a Bank

I often get asked something along the line of, “If you weren’t leading Automattic, what would you work on?” There’s not a single answer to this question; the answer changes day to day. But I think …

4904

Let’s stop copying C (2016)

Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of…

4912

Jax vs. Julia (Vs PyTorch)

A while ago there was an interesting thread on the Julia Discourse about the “state of machine learning in Julia”. I posted a response discussing the differences between Julia and Python (both JAX and PyTorch), and it seemed to be really well received! Since then this topic seems to keep coming up, so I thought I’d…

4917

Design

I chose images from 1973 deliberately. It's easier to tell good design from bad when you're not looking at current fashions. (Try looking at the haircuts in an old high school yearbook.) Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical "average" user…