Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,420 posts.

Software Engineering
2017
212

Minimal PDF

Most PDF files do not look readable in a text editor. Compression, encryption, and embedded images are largely to blame. After removing these three components, one can more easily see that PDF is a human-readable document description language.

220

Modern Front-end in Rails

An opinionated guide to modern, modular, component-based approach to handling your presentation logic in Rails that does not depend on any frontend framework. Follow our three-part tutorial to learn the bare minimum of up-to-date frontend techniques by example and finally make sense of it all. Part 1: goodbye Asset…

233

How I Write Tests

The longer I spend as a software engineer, the more obsessive I get about testing. I fully subscribe to the definition of legacy code as “code without an automated test suite.” I’m convinced that the best thing you can do to encourage fast progress in a test suite is to design for testing and have a fast, reliable…

239

Working with time in Postgres

A massive amount of reporting queries, whether really intensive data analysis, or just basic insights into your business involving looking at data over a certain time period. Postgres has really rich support for dealing with time out of the box, something that’s often very underweighted when dealing with a database…