Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,894 posts.

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4774

JSON vs. XML

Today's guest is Douglas Crockford. He's sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript's good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that there's a better way to build software. This is foundational stuff for the…

4775

The Shape of a Mars Mission

“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go…

4785

Racket-On-Chez Status

posted by Matthew Flatt with thanks to collaborators Kent Dybvig, Andy Keep, Gustavo Massaccesi, Sarah Spall, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, and Jon Zeppieri It's been almost a year since we decided to try running Racket on Chez Scheme, and it has been almost six ...

4790

Fun With HTTP Headers

Like any good web developer, I have a tendency to poke around at people’s web sites to see if I can figure out how they’re implemented. After poking at enough sites, I started noticing that people were putting some weird and interesting stuff in their HTTP headers. So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to actually go…

4800

Sustainability with Rust

Rust is a programming language implemented as a set of open source projects. It combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java. Rust started in 2006 as a personal project of Graydon Hoare before becoming a research project at…