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
6131

Version SAT

The package version selection problem is to find a set of dependencies that can be used to build a top-level package P that is complete (all dependencies satisfied) and compatible (no two incompatible packages are selected). There may be no such set, because of the diamond dependency problem: perhaps A needs B and C…

6136

Basic Scripting with Awk and Gnuplot

Posted to HN. Comments and discussion highly encouraged. Introduction This will be a short example-based guide to (a) awk (b) gnuplot and (c) using them in a script. I needed to graph some data based on the output of a command run a couple times. So what better way to solve that five minute task than to spend an hour…

6144

Version control second coming

The very same week we signed our first ever angel investor for Plastic SCM, in early summer of 2005, Linus Torvalds announced Git. I had spent more than a year pitching investors to build a new version control, and suddenly the creator of Linux was building one himself. That week I understood the road ahead was going…

6149

History of the PDF

Explore the remarkable history of the PDF. This ubiquitous format, which has shaped the way we share and view documents, has a story as compelling as its widespread use. Discover why the PDF, often criticized yet universally used, continues to be a vital part of our digital world in 2023.