Best of 2013

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

Software Engineering
68

The string type is broken

My previous article, “We don’t need a string type“, caused a bit of stir. Though the feedback is mixed, there is a common theme of a string being a useful feature. After doing a bit more research I can determine only one thing: most current string types are broken! Many of us believe our strings […]

73

In defense of <canvas>

My friend and fellow Chicagoan Evan Miller wrote an excellent blog post over the weekend: Why I Develop For The Mac . It's full of great reasons why his software (which is also excellent, by the way) was written for the desktop, despite the fact that he's a web developer, even the creator of an Erlang web framework .

85

Prince Of Persia Code Review

On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. Even though it is the Apple II version written in 6502 assembly language, it was a pleasant experience to dive in the code of that mythical game: As usual there were many fascinating sofware wizardries to discover. The Apple II apparent poor…

86

Remember when people tracked bugs?

I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then. I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases. Boy, those were the days. Failing that, developers used to put their email…