Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 497 posts.

Web & Frontend
304

The lie of the API

Really, nobody takes your website serious anymore if you don’t offer an API . And that’s what everybody did: they got themselves a nice API . An enormous amount of money and energy is wasted on developing API s that are hard to create and even harder to use. This is wonderful news for developers, who get paid to build…

313

Mod_python - the long story

This story started back in 1996. I was in my early twenties, working as a programmer at a small company specializing in on-line reporting of certain pharmaceutical data. There was a web-based application (which was extremely cool considering how long ago this was), but unfortunately it was written in Visual Basic by a…