Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 267 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…

6

OS X Command Line Utilities

The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you’re migrating from Linux, you’ll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren’t aware that OS X comes with a number of its own text-based utilities not found on any other operating system. Learning about…

15

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…

16

Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

To say this post pains me would be an understatement. More than any other technology, Evernote is part of me, having evolved from habit to instinct over several years and nearly seven thousand notes. Every day ideas flit through my head, ideas for essays, for characters, for jokes. Just now I catch a glimpse of […]

20

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…

29

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…