Best of 2012

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2012. 285 posts.

Web & Frontend
181

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…

185

GET /browser.exe

Jon Howell dreams of a new Internet. In this new Internet, cross-browser compatibility checking is a distant memory and new features can be unilaterally be added to browsers without having to convince the world to upgrade first. The idea which makes this Internet possible is so crazy, it just might work.

190

Cache Them If You Can

I always smile when I hear a web performance speaker say this. I forget who said it first, but I’ve heard it numerous times at conferences and meetups over the past few years. It’s true! Caching is critical for making web pages faster. I’ve written extensively about caching:

204

OOCSS + Sass = The best way to CSS

Object-oriented CSS is awesome. But littering your markup with non-semantic classes is not awesome. Those classes sprinkled all over your HTML are going to change, and that’s not gonna be fun. But if you combine OOCSS and Sass you get the best of both worlds: modular CSS without bloated, hard-to-maintain HTML.