Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,109 posts.

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2025
3608

A critique of package managers

n.b. This is a written version of a dialogue from a YouTube video: 2 Language Creators vs 2 Idiots | The StandupPackage managers (for programming languages) are evil.⁠11 The term “evil” is being used partially hyperbolic to make a point.To start, I need to make a few distinctions between concepts a lot of programmers…

3615

RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet

Think about it for a second: could the internet exist without standards and protocols? Of course not! Computers need shared rules and agreements to communicate with one another. Even human languages, like English, work much the same way. They function as a kind of communication protocol because we’ve all agreed on…

3616

Move on to ESM-Only

Three years ago, I wrote a post about shipping ESM & CJS in a single package , advocating for dual CJS/ESM formats to ease user migration and trying to make the best of both worlds. Back then, I didn’t fully agree with aggressively shipping ESM-only , as I considered the ecosystem wasn’t ready, especially since the…