Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 6,505 posts.

Tools & Productivity
Any year
4065

How do you visualize code?

The other day I was reading about the development of personal computers and the desktop GUI, and I was thinking about how comfortable we all have become with the analogy of the “desktop” for our personal computers. We place files in folders and keep them on our desktops. There’s a lot of physical action going on…

4069

How to prioritize tasks?

Shipping products is hard. What makes it hard is that typical products involve multiple teams and multiple dependencies. Navigating these challenges is non-trivial. There are technical challenges to overcome, but those are typically not the biggest blockers. (There are enough smart people in the room to take care of…

4075

Richer command line interfaces

This post is preceded by a description of two types of command line interfaces . The more command line-like of these two types integrates into a normal shell session ( python , telnet , bash ) instead of using the alternate screen to present a fullscreen text user interface ( top , vim , emacs ). Sometimes programs…

4080

Why TDD isn't crap

After my recent vitriol about unit testing, a couple of people sent me Why TDD is Crap as a thorough debunking of TDD and unit testing. As someone very interested in software correctness, I ended up writing a debunking of his debunking. Transcriptions will be in quotes, my responses below. Some important notes: From…