Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 488 posts.

Software Engineering
481

mikeash.com: NSBlog

accessors (2) advertisement (11) advice (4) apple (7) apress arc (6) arduino assembly (11) assert (2) atomic (3) audio (4) autorelease (3) blocks (14) bolo (3) book (4) books (2) braaaiiiinnnssss (2) bridging bug (3) c (19) c++ (4) c99 casestudy chemicalburn (4) clang (5) classic (2) cocoa (42) code (4) codeinjection…

483

The protocol-relative URL

Update 2014.12.17: Now that SSL is encouraged for everyone and doesn’t have performance concerns , this technique is now an anti-pattern . If the asset you need is available on SSL, then always use the https:// asset.

484

Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style

We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…

485

Things that amuse me

I think the only serious gripe is what you call your biggest gripe, and I must say that I envy this in Haskell. As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators. You give part of the reason; the other part is that deforestation and related transformations…

487

nasal demons

Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…