Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 1,981 posts.

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1413

AM – Attribute Modules for CSS

A few months ago, I read an article by Harry Roberts where he introduced an interesting concept for working with related classes in CSS. In his article, he describes the use of the [] characters in class attributes to help understand their purpose at a quick glance. He presents this example, arguing that it makes the…

1414

A Path to Full-time Open Source

Two years ago today I released Sidekiq Pro, my commercial extension to Sidekiq, as an experiment to see if I could make OSS development financially viable for individual developers. I had no idea if anyone would trust me and buy it. Can you think of anyone else selling a Rubygem?

1421

Allocators in Rust

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Rust’s allocator story, and in particular our relationship to jemalloc. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I wanted to try and summarize my understanding and explain for others what is going on. I am trying to be as factually precise in this post as possible. If you see a…

1422

Things from Python I'd miss in Go

Let's assume Go has one killer feature – cheap concurrency – not present in any other language with similar serial performance (ruling out say Erlang). And let's agree that it gives Go its perfect niche – and we're only discussing uses of Go outside that niche from now on. So we won't come back to concurrency till the…

1423

Ten Years of World of Warcraft

WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered…

1433

The Art of Unix Usability (2004)

This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license, with the additional proviso that the right to publish it on paper for sale or other for-profit use is reserved to Pearson Education, Inc. A reference copy of this license may be found at…

1434

Using Freenet

I've been following the Freenet project for many years, occasionally firing it up and seeing if I can do anything useful with it. I've been using it regularly over the last month and it has come a long way since I first tried it. It's much faster than what it was in the past. This post describes a bit of...