Best of 2014

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

Software Engineering
160

Lotus, a web framework for Ruby

Lotus is a complete web framework for Ruby with a strong emphasis on object oriented design and testability. If you use it, you employ less DSLs and more objects, zero monkey-patching, separation of concerns between MVC layers. Each library is designed to be small, fast and testable.

165

OpenGL in 2014

Valve is investing in OpenGL to hedge themselves against Microsoft. Some well-known developers have written about the deficiencies in the API. A few competing, proprietary APIs have popped up. In an effort to remain competitive, Khronos announces glnext: a ground-up rethinking of the OpenGL and OpenGL ES APIs. This…

174

How to zero a buffer

Now, we don't want to truly change the observable behaviour of our software — but fortunately the C standard has a more liberal concept of "observable" than most people. In particular, the C standard states that the observable behaviour includes accesses to volatile objects . What is a volatile object, you ask? It is…