Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,844 posts.

Software Engineering
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20856

The Emacs Problem (2005)

The Emacs Problem Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Charles G. pointed out in an email discussion recently: Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java

20864

A crazy Ruby quine: a spinning globe.

RubyConf に参加するためには、やっぱり 山手 quine みたいに東京限定ネタは通じにくいですよね。これからは Quine もグローバルでないといけないと感じました。 でも世界的に有名な環状線とか知らないので、世界的に有名な回るものを書いてみました。 v=0000;eval$s=%q~d=%!^Lcf<LK8, _@7gj*LJ=c5nM)Tp1g0%Xv.,S[<>YoP 4ZojjV)O>qIH1/n[|2yE[>:ieC "%.#% :::##" 97N-A&Kj_K_><wS5rtWk@*a+Y5 yH?b[F^e7C/56j|pmRe+:)B "##% ::#########…

20878

The Building Blocks of Ruby

When showing off cool features of Ruby to the uninitiated (or to a language sparring partner [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1099305/why-is-ruby-more-suitable-for-rails-than-python/1099367] ), the excited Rubyist often shows off Ruby's "powerful block syntax". Unfortunately, the Rubyist uses "powerful block…

20879

In praise of git’s index

I still run into people lambasting Git for the concept of the index from time to time. It seems strange and superfluous to users of other VCS s – like a speed bump that serves no purpose. Why not just commit the changes in the working copy? This perception is understandable; when I first heard of Git, back as a…