Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 1,031 posts.

Software Engineering
33

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…

40

Auditing GitHub users’ SSH key quality

If you have just/as of late gotten an email about your keys being revoked, this is because of me, and if you have, you should really go through and make sure that no one has done anything terrible to you, since you have opened yourself to people doing very mean things to you for what is most likely a very long time.

41

Image diffing using CSS

Since the last post [http://franklinta.com/2014/09/08/computing-css-matrix3d-transforms/] on CSS was popular here is another simple CSS trick that I found useful in the past. Let’s say we want to find the difference between these two images: You can do this by simply inverting the colors and then stacking them…

44

High quality GIF with FFmpeg

About two years ago, I tried to improve the support of the GIF encoding in FFmpeg to make it at least decent. This notably led to the addition of the transparency mechanism in the GIF encoder. While this is not always optimal depending on your source, it is in the most common cases. Still, this was merely an attempt…

49

Files Are Hard

I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…