Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 111 posts.

Tools & Productivity
66

Make: Theory and Practice

make is a widely used and valuable development tool. It's a "build" tool: it builds programs and documentation according to a "recipe". It could really be used for anything where someone edits some files, and then runs a series of processing steps to generate some other form from the edited files. For the most part…

69

How I develop with Nix

Recently NixOS was posted to the Haskell reddit, and seems to have been received well. In the comments I mentioned that NixOS allows me to be a more productive Haskell developer, and I would like to discuss how I am using the features offered by NixOS. Before we get into those details, allow me to briefly summarise…

80

A curl cheat sheet

MOAR DOX! Whenever we ask curl users what they lack in our project and what we should improve, the response is always clear: documentation. Here are the most common curl command line options when doing HTTP operations. This is the web page rendered as an image, click it to get to the web version. The … Continue…

86

Practical Makefiles, by example

The purpose of this document is to explain how to write practical makefiles for your everyday hacks and projects. I want to illustrate, how easy it is to use make for building your programs, and doing so, dispel the notion that resorting to big clunky graphical IDEs, or makefile generators such as autotools or cmake…