Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 1,013 posts.

Software Engineering
331

The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)

There are several reasons why one should prefer L A T E X to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that L A T E X is free ). There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you…

355

The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

If you join the CPAN pull request challenge, then at the start of each month in 2015 you'll be emailed a (somewhat) randomly selected CPAN distribution. You'll have one month to submit at least one pull request. You don't have to be an experienced Perl programmer, CPAN author, or githubber. The goal is to help others…

358

Building C Projects

C is a compiled language, and as such, C programs need to be converted to executables in order to use them. Typically, programmers do this with some sort of build system, rather than running the necessary commands manually, because the compilation process for a large project tends to be quite complex.

359

It's Go Time On Linux

Some interesting changes related to timekeeping in the upcoming Go 1.3 release inspired us to take a closer look at how Go programs keep time with the help of the Linux kernel. Timekeeping is a complex topic and determining the current time isn’t as simple as it might seem at first glance.