Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 196 posts.
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …
When dealing with an extensive infrastructure and many team members, managing SSH keys for authentication can become unwieldy. However, SSH can utilize cert…
Go 1.5 is the first step toward a new low-latency future for the Go garbage collector.
Cgo is an important part of Go: It's your window to calling anything that anything that has C bindings. But while cgo works for us, it hasn’t come for free.
Update : On Sep. 28, 2015, Zed Shaw wrote a rebuttal to this post. You can find the details here .
I know Vim better than most. Vim was my first real text editor.[1] I used it for years. I helped write the Floobits plugin for Vim. I’ve delved into Vim’s source code to figure out its workings. I e…
Or, I want to use PBT, but I can never think of any properties to use
Racial segregation has always been a pernicious social problem in the United States. Many factors have contributed to segregation including prejudice, zoning laws, housing discrimination, and loan discrimination. Although much effort has been extended to desegregate our schools, churches, and neighborhoods, the US…
Yagni ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") is the principle that we should not build presumptive features. It should not be used as a justification for neglecting internal quality.
A delightful language with friendly error messages, great performance, small assets, and no runtime exceptions.
Personal website of Fernando Borretti.
The size of binaries in the Nim programming language seems to be a popular topic recently . Nim’s slogan is expressive, efficient, elegant , so let’s examine the efficient part in this post by exploring a few ways to reduce the size of a simple Nim Hello World binary on Linux. Along the way we will:
These are by no means all the reasons why your JavaScript might fail to run even when you expected it to. Andy Bell has a great list over at piccalil.li of a handful of very realistic reasons JavaScript won’t be available . Check ’em out, and be prepared.
We are improving and enriching the connections between the Java virtual machine and well-defined but “foreign” (non-Java) APIs, including many interfaces commonly used by C programmers.
This is an essential truth of async in its purest form: There is no thread.
Update Jun 18, 2014: I have made some corrections since the original version of this post.
As I was driving home, I found myself thinking about a favorite section of the book Accidental Empires, by longtime computer journalist Robert X. Cringely. Originally published in 1993, it’s getting a little long in the tooth, but it still contains a lot of great insights about the personalities
Update: This post represents my views before I joined the Microsoft Edge team, and before I got involved with browsers or web standards in general. I leave it…
React, if you’ve somehow missed it, is the new hotness in web programming. The idea is simple: each React component describes its view idempotently, in JavaScript. The view is rendered entirely based on a small amount of state the component keeps internally. Given the same state, a given component will always render…
The growth of Internet and general connectivity has triggered the proportionate need for responsive and scalable code. This proposal aims to answer that need by making writing explicitly asynchronous, concurrent Python code easier and more Pythonic.
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket
