Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 157 posts.

Tools & Productivity
129

LeftPad and Go: can tooling help?

You’ve probably heard that story about NPM community and LeftPad package, that broke thousands JavaScript projects worldwide. There was a nice follow-up article titled “Have We Forget How To Program” and one guy even created left-pad.io - Left-Pad As A Service web service. People got a lot of fun discussing this story.

134

Actually using ed (2012)

The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…

136

What's in a Build Tool?

A "Build tool" is a catch-all term that refers to anything that is needed to get a piece of software set up, but isn't needed after that. Different programming communities have a wealth of different tools: some use stalwarts like make , some use loose collections of .sh scripts, some use XML-based tools like Maven or…

150

Version SAT

The package version selection problem is to find a set of dependencies that can be used to build a top-level package P that is complete (all dependencies satisfied) and compatible (no two incompatible packages are selected). There may be no such set, because of the diamond dependency problem: perhaps A needs B and C…