Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 531 posts.

Software Engineering
302

Backbone vs Ember

Ember and Backbone are both promising JavaScript frameworks but have completely different philosophies. In this post, I'll compare the two, both from a practical and philosophical perspective. I'll defer to real world experience with Backbone and SproutCore (Ember's predecessor), as well as basic experiments with…

309

Why Use Postgres - Part 2

This post is a list of many of the reasons to use Postgres, much this content as well as how to use these features will later be curated within PostgresGuide.com. If you need to get started check out Postgres.app for Mac, or get a Cloud instance at Heroku Postgres for free Last week I did a post on the many reasons to…

321

Live Streaming in Rails 4.0

TL;DR Rails 4.0 will allow you to stream arbitrary data at arbitrary intervals with Live Streaming. HAPPY MONDAY EVERYONE! Besides enabling multi-threading by default, one of the things I really wanted for Rails 4.0 is the ability to stream data to the client. I want the ability to treat the response object as an I/O…

325

What’s to love about C?

Antiquated, clunky, and unsafe. Though beloved to some, C is a language that many choose to hate. The mass opinion is indeed so negative it’s hard to believe that anybody would program anything in C. Yet they do. In fact a lot of things, even new things, are programmed in C. The standard was recently […]

326

Actually using Ed

The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…