Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,304 posts.

Software Engineering
2016
1128

Actually using ed (2012)

The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…

1138

What's in a Build Tool?

A "Build tool" is a catch-all term that refers to anything that is needed to get a piece of software set up, but isn't needed after that. Different programming communities have a wealth of different tools: some use stalwarts like make , some use loose collections of .sh scripts, some use XML-based tools like Maven or…