Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 168 posts.

Tools & Productivity
67

Programmer Time Translation Table

An experienced project manager I used to work with claimed that he took the programmers’ time estimates, multiplied by pi and converted to the next time magnitude to get the true number. 1 day converts to 3.14 weeks. He had learned the hard way that programmers are bad at estimating times . To get a more precise…

70

Master Keys

Earlier this month, a retired New York City locksmith was selling a set of “master keys” on eBay: Three of the five are standard issue for members of the FDNY, and the set had a metal dog tag that was embossed with an FDNY lieutenant’s shield number, 6896. The keys include the all-purpose “1620,” a master firefighter…

72

The perfect email

As you might imagine, I get many random inbound emails. Last I checked, I was getting about 500 emails a day, and about 50 of them a day are from people I don’t know. They often ask for advice, or just want me to look at their startup for investment. This is fine, I try … Continue Reading >

79

Adobe's Source Code Pro Font

Source Code Pro is a new font released by Adobe. It does wonders for technical fixed width and source code text readability. I highly recommend to use this font with your text editor, terminal and other software development tools (Especially if your eyes are getting old like mine). UPDATE 2: I am not sure how

82

A Tour of the Acme Editor

People I work with recognize my computer easily: it's the one with nothing but yellow windows and blue bars on the screen. That's the text editor acme, written by Rob Pike for Plan 9 in the early 1990s. Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface. It's difficult to explain acme without seeing it…