Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
457

Ideology

Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…

462

Falling Into The Pit of Success

Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen

463

wheel of reincarnation

[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors , Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward…

464

Hacker News API

Today we’re excited to launch an official Hacker News API [https://github.com/HackerNews/API]. [https://github.com/HackerNews/API] We’ve partnered up with Firebase [http://firebase.com] (YC S11) so that the data we’re making available will be near real time, which should be a huge improvement for developers who had to…

466

The largest Git repo

It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder […]