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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.

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2020
1114

The database I wish I had

I watched the talk " Platform as a Reflection of Values: Joyent, Node.js and beyond " by Bryan Cantrill, and I think he was able to put into words something I already felt for some time: if there’s no piece of software out there that reflects your values, it’s time for you to build that softwarefootnote:talk-time[ At…

1134

Inventing Monads

I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?

1136

Don't trust default timeouts

Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t. When you make a network call without setting a timeout, you are telling your code that you are 100% confident that the call is going to succeed. Would you really take that bet? If you…

1137

What Shell Am I Using?

I wanted to install the latest version of zsh on my MacBook Pro. This is usually the first thing I install when setting up a new machine. A brew install zsh and a chsh later and I'm good to go (well, technically I had to add the homebrew location of zsh to /etc/shells as well). Close out Terminal.app and reopen to…