Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 537 posts.

Software Engineering
455

On Scala

This is one of a series of posts on languages, you can read more about that here . Scala's blending of programming paradigms in a single language is impressive. It's fun to write code in and is a good language for leaning into the functional plus static typing paradigm. As much as I like

462

In Love with LÖVE

I’ve been looking for the past year for a suitable programming environment for my two boys (10 & 7) that moves them beyond graphical environments like Scratch and Lego Mindstorms and into the land of real programming (a [few years ago](http://an.ton.io/blog/articles/2008/11/08/go-get-scratch) we had great success with…

468

Is Unicode Safe?

Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure.  — Bruce Schneier, 2000 Over the last 25 years Unicode has succeeded. It hasn't displaced all other character encodings, but it's clearly on its way there. It's supported widely enough that it's a compatible choice, new projects use it, and it's becoming the…

471

Musings about Debian and Python

On a regular basis, I find myself the odd-man-out when it comes to talking about how to work with Python on Debian systems. I’m going to write this and post it so that I might be able to point people at my thoughts without having to write the same email in response to each thread that pops up.

475

Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)

This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…

476

Why GitHub is not your CV

Two days ago, Ashe Dryden published an article I’ve been desperately wishing someone would write for months: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community . It’s a detailed, well-researched take-down of the seemingly quite popular myth that open-source contributions are a useful way to screen candidates for…