Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 599 posts.

Software Engineering
38

Curl, 17 years old today

Today we celebrate the fact that it is exactly 17 years since the first public release of curl. I have always been the lead developer and maintainer of the project. When I released that first version in the spring of 1998, we had only a handful of users and a handful of contributors. curl was … Continue reading curl…

39

Why Python 3 Exists

This month I invited to Q&A at PuPPy [https://youtu.be/2XviXtxWKO8?list=PL4S0lvhXvdhIV2C28Ia_DeIeloBrsQBOW] (the Puget Sound Python users group) that eventually led to me explaining why Python 3 came into existence and the whole string/bytes deal. I ended up receiving a compliment on the explanation which

44

What Color Is Your Function?

I don’t know about you, but nothing gets me going in the morning quite like a good old fashioned programming language rant. It stirs the blood to see someone skewer one of those “blub” languages the plebians use, muddling through their day with it between furtive visits to StackOverflow.

50

Breaking the fourth wall with Minecraft

Update 23/11/2015 - I’ve got many requests about the WiFi bulbs. You can find them on dx.com. Enjoy! Recently I started playing Minecraft, again. I find vanilla Minecraft somewhat boring, so I always look out for modpacks. After searching for new modpacks, I stumpled upon FTB Horizons: Daybreaker. Looking at the…

53

Biggest image in the smallest space

What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…

54

A Good Vimrc

There are tons of tutorials such as this one on the internet that contain all kinds of awesome hacks to make your Vim better, but the absolute worst way to make your environment better is to just copy it wholesale from others.

56

The Unix Philosophy

The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.