Best of 2011

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

Software Engineering
122

Sublime Text 2: Beta

Since the first public Alpha at the end of January, there have been 12 new releases, and many more dev builds. On average, that's a new version every two weeks for the past five months. During this time, Sublime Text 2 has made great strides in functionality, and a correspondingly large increase in users. Sublime Text…

123

Donut math - How donut.c works

There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in my "donut" code from 2006 , and I've had a couple requests to explain this one. It's been five years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my memory, so I will reconstruct it from scratch, in great detail, and hopefully get approximately the same result.

125

The Dropbox API

Modern work can be frustrating and chaotic—if you don’t have the right tools. From context engineering to multimodal search, go behind the scenes and hear how Dropbox engineers are building AI that actually understands you, so you can focus on the work that matters most.

131

ORM is an anti-pattern

ORM looks great early in a project but breaks down as complexity grows, forcing you to learn SQL anyway. Relations aren't objects. Either use NoSQL for object-like data or write a model layer with real SQL. ORM's abstraction is leaky, its efficiency poor, and the alternatives are better.

132

How to improve your programming skills

Learning new programming languages will expose you to new ways of thinking; especially if the new language uses a paradigm which you aren’t yet familiar with. Many of the ways of thinking that you will learn can be applied to languages that you already know, and you might even want to start using the new language for…