Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 679 posts.

Software Engineering
550

MySQL Text vs. Varchar Performance

Starting with MySQL 5.0.3, the maximum field length for VARCHAR fields was increased from 255 characters to 65,535 characters. This is good news, as VARCHAR fields, as opposed to TEXT fields, are stored in-row for the MyISAM storage engine (InnoDB has different characteristics). TEXT and BLOB fields are not stored…

562

Django and Python 3

About 18 months ago I blogged about Django and Python 3, I gave the official roadmap. Not a lot has changed since then unfortunately, we’ve dropped 2.3 entirely, 2.4 is on it’s way out, but there’s no 3.X support in core. One fun thing has changed though: I get to help set the roadmap, which is a) cool, b) means the…

563

Racket 5.1 Released

_posted by Eli Barzilay_ Racket version 5.1 is now available from http://racket-lang.org/The most significant change in version 5.1 is a rewrite of the GUI library. Unix/X users will see the biggest difference with this change, because DrRacket and all R...

565

Build a CMS, no forms allowed

You may have noticed that quite a lot is happening in the Midgard land. Nowadays Midgard2 itself is a generic content repository that can be used for both desktop and web applications. Midgard MVC is a generic web framework for PHP5 that can be used with Midgard2 or without it. And then there is Midgard Create, the…