Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,823 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
6518

Emacs for Professionals

This is a series of brief articles aimed at teaching Emacs to computer professionals who are unfamiliar with it. I do not dwell on the basics of the user interface, which can be learned from the built-in tutorial. Instead, each article in this series will distill one very specific command line (CLI) tool or technique…

6520

GitHub Actions Pitfalls

During one of my assignments, I worked with GitHub Actions pretty much every day. I implemented workflows, created new actions, and helped people migrate their projects from jenkins to actions. As much as I like actions – and I like them a lot – there are some things that caught me off guard. I have collected some of…

6522

A bug I wish I hadn't caught

When I catch a bug before release I’m usually glad, because I’ve narrowly averted ruining someone’s experience or eating their data. Today I found a bug that I wish I hadn’t caught, a bug that I wish I’d released into the wild to witness in its full glory. I found this bug in my digital card game Ring of Worlds, and…

6525

Nix wrote half of my debugger

A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…

6527

SSH quoting

A while back there was a thread on one of our company mailing lists about SSH quoting, and I posted a long answer to it. Since then a few people have asked me questions that caused me to reach for it, so I thought it might be helpful if I …

6530

Janet for Mortals (2023)

I wrote a book. It’s called Janet for Mortals, and it’s free, and it’s on the internet, and you can read it right now. And you should read it right now, instead of reading this blog post, because this blog post is not very interesting if you haven’t read the book. Heck, this blog post is not very interesting even if…

6536

Redis Geo

Note (version) : I wrote this originally as a Redis module in early 2014, then Redis included a modified version directly into official Redis releases in 2016. Note (implementation) : The implementation included with Redis 3.2+ changed some parameter orderings from my original (intentional, well-thought-out) design…