Best of 2008

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2008. 39 posts.

Web & Frontend
3

Rails and Merb Merge

Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation. Before talking tech, and even going into the details of the announcement, I want

15

John Resig on TraceMonkey

I’ve been waiting to blog about this for a long time now. A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a techniques, called trace trees (PDF), which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey.

19

Google Knol is Evil

Google Knol gives its own content unfair PageRank advantages over competitors, which is an abuse of monopoly power. Google has crossed the line from organizing the world's information to stealing traffic from better sources and monetizing the theft. This is evil, plain and simple.

30

Picking Time

It’s not often that new user interface conventions are born – or popularized. Even less so within the realm of web development. I’d argue that Sparklines and Lightbox are two of the best examples of UI conventions that were popularized on the web.