Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 653 posts.

Software Engineering
31

PostgreSQL: Jsonb has committed

Great news: PostgreSQL introduced jsonb support, which is real data type with binary storage and indexing ! This work is a confluence of two projects - our hstore and json, which were existed in PostgreSQL for years in somewhat incomplete forms - hstore (10 years old!) implements key-value storage…

51

Rewriting Reddit (2005)

2012 note: This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this…

57

Minimum Viable Block Chain

Block chain is agnostic of any 'currency' and it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases. This is a ground up explanation of why the particular pieces (digital signatures, proof-of-work, transaction blocks) are needed, and how they all come together to form the minimum viable block chain with all of…