Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 109 posts.

Tools & Productivity
1

Hacker News API

Today we’re excited to launch an official Hacker News API [https://github.com/HackerNews/API]. [https://github.com/HackerNews/API] We’ve partnered up with Firebase [http://firebase.com] (YC S11) so that the data we’re making available will be near real time, which should be a huge improvement for developers who had to…

8

A Server Naming Scheme

Here at MNX, we’ve been busy setting up a brand new data center for our cloud hosted services. We started off as a consulting company providing managed Linux services, which means we have been exposed to a ton of different customer environments and an equal number of schemes for naming equipment…not all of them good…

10

A Motion-Sensing Keyboard

We present a new type of augmented mechanical keyboard, sensing rich and expressive motion gestures performed both on and directly above the device. A low-resolution matrix of infrared (IR) proximity sensors is interspersed with the keys of a regular mechanical keyboard. This results in coarse but high frame-rate…

12

Pain we forgot

Much of the pain in programming is taken for granted. After years of repetition it fades into the background and is forgotten. The first step in making programming easier is to be concious of what makes it hard. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a smart but inexperienced end user trying to build, test and…

18

Firebug 2.0

The story of Firefox and Firebug are synonymous with the rise of the web. We fought the good fight and changed how developers inspect HTML and debug JS in the browser. Firebug ushered the Web 2.0 era. Today, the work pioneered by the Firebug community through the last 12 years lives on in Firefox Developer Tools…