Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
7084

Problems with CSVs (2016)

Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.

7088

A hiring test I'd like to run

(For the avoidance of doubt, I have nothing to do with hiring at my employer. This test is probably deeply problematic in ways you'll angrily Tweet me about.) I'd like to tell you a story! I am a teenager applying for temp jobs. It's the late 1990s and the temp agency have asked me to take a Microsoft Office test. You…

7092

A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs

The Threading library Starting in Emacs 26 some very ambitious changes were added. Basic thread support was enabled, laying the groundwork for a future concurrent emacs. The docs layout this possibility: Emacs Lisp provides a limited form of concurrency, called threads. All the threads in a given instance of Emacs…