Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,545 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
11524

Sometimes Kill -9 Isn't Enough

If there’s one thing to know about distributed systems, it’s that they have to be designed with the expectation of failure. It’s also safe to say that most software these days is, in some form, distributed—whether it’s a database, mobile app, or enterprise SaaS. If you have two different processes talking to each…

11540

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…

11542

Life Before Unicode

Unicode definitely added a lot of complexity to string handling, and people who use languages with ASCII alphabets exclusively may think it's unjustified. However, I'm a non-ASCII language speaker who's old enough to remember the alternatives, and the alternatives are far worse than the complexity of Unicode.

11544

Making sense of React Server Components

This year, the React team unveiled something they've been quietly researching for years: an official way to run React components exclusively on the server. This is a significant paradigm shift, and it's caused a whole lot of confusion in the React community. In this tutorial, we'll explore this new world, and build an…