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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,636 posts.

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2373

Down the Golang Nil Rabbit Hole

Edit 2021-03-30: Jeremy Mikkola wrote about some closely related topics back in 2017. Edit 2021-03-31: Chris Siebenmann wrote a response to this post that explains exactly how interface values that are nil are typed. It’s more complicated than I thought! I’m not sure I have another Rust & Postgres blog post in me…

2375

Pascal at Apple

Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…

2386

The Case Against Python 3

This document serves as a collection of reasons why beginners should avoid Python 3 as of November 22nd, 2016. I give two sets of reasons as I see them now. One for total beginners, and another for people who are more knowledgeable about programming. The first section attempts to explain the case against starting with…

2400

Incremental Parsing in Go

This post is an attempt to explain the incremental parsing algorithm aretext uses for syntax highlighting. Like the rest of aretext, parsers are implemented in Go for portability and performance. Most people do not consider Go a functional programming language; nonetheless, aretext’s parsers rely on functional…