Top posts

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

Software Engineering
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8885

Working with Git Worktrees in Magit

I’ll admit that until fairly recently I had no idea git worktrees existed. They’ve been part of git for a decade1 and I never once needed them. Feature branches did the job just fine - create a branch, do the work, merge it, delete it, and start over. What finally introduced me to worktrees was, of all things, AI…

8894

Backbone vs Ember

Ember and Backbone are both promising JavaScript frameworks but have completely different philosophies. In this post, I'll compare the two, both from a practical and philosophical perspective. I'll defer to real world experience with Backbone and SproutCore (Ember's predecessor), as well as basic experiments with…

8903

Mod_python - the long story

This story started back in 1996. I was in my early twenties, working as a programmer at a small company specializing in on-line reporting of certain pharmaceutical data. There was a web-based application (which was extremely cool considering how long ago this was), but unfortunately it was written in Visual Basic by a…

8905

Not Explicit

Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…