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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,211 posts.

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12640

Against Best Practices

I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2)…

12648

My favorite apps on F-Droid

I often recommend F-Droid to my Android-using friends. F-Droid is an alternative app store which contains only Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). It's great because the apps are almost all not evil. Did you know that a flashlight app doesn't need access to your contacts, location, and pictures? Did you know that…

12654

Moving from Rust to C++

Note to readers: this is an April Fools post, intended to satirize bad arguments made against Rust. I have mixed feelings about it now, as I think people who understood the context appreciated the humor, but some people were confused. That’s partly because it’s written in a very persuasive style, and I mixed in some…

12656

Deleting System32\curl.exe

Let me tell you a story about how Windows users are deleting files from their installation and as a consequence end up in tears. Background The real and actual curl tool has been shipped as part of Windows 10 and Windows 11 for many years already. It is called curl.exe and is located in the … Continue reading deleting…

12658

Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15

I’m working on more posts about the Catalina release, but I wanted to start with a short warning. I’ve heard a bunch of reports of data loss in Apple Mail. Thankfully, none seem to be caused by my apps . (Ironically, one of the bugs I’ve encountered is the inability to delete messages via AppleScript.) And, in fact…