Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,842 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
16536

In defence of SQL

SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.

16539

PHP 5 and 7.0 end of life

Critical PHP Security Release 21 Oct 2026: PHP released emergency patches on 21 October 2026 for two critical unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) Learn why PHP EOL matters, the security & compliance risks of running unsupported PHP, and how to plan, test, and upgrade to supported versions.

16543

Code vs. No-code

There was a conversation on Twitter this week that helped to clarify my thinking about something, and I wanted to share. There is a sort of tension between “code” and “no-code” (sometimes “low-code”) solutions. People who consider themselves software developers see people trying to use no-code solutions to do things…

16544

Excessive nil pointer checks in Go

Let’s talk about nil pointer checks in Go. You want to prevent panics in production, but that doesn’t start with a deferred recover. It starts with defensive programming. Check your inputs, check your bounds, and check pointers for nil before dereferencing them. I’ve started to see more nil checks in Go code. In the…