Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 1,304 posts.

Software Engineering
1082

All Software is Legacy

In what may be judged in years to come as a moment of madness, I have volunteered to be the primary maintainer of the Perl CGI module (CGI.pm). For the non-technical readers of this post: CGI.pm is a few thousand lines of code that in the mid to late nineties, and even some years later, was helping many websites…

1083

Scala’s Types of Types

This blog post came into being after a few discussions about Types in Scala after some of JavaOne’s parties in 2013. After those discussions I figured that many questions are often repeated by different people, during their learning of Scala. I though that we didn’t have a full list of all tricks what we can to with…

1084

How to Name Clojure Functions

This is a guide on naming Clojure functions. There are exceptions to every rule. When you’re defining something based on natural language, there are more exceptions than rules. I break these rules more often than I follow them. This guide is just a starting point for thinking about how to name things.

1086

Emacs Bytecode Internals (2014)

Byte-code compilation is an underdocumented — and in the case of the recent lexical binding updates, undocumented — part of Emacs. Most users know that Elisp is usually compiled into a byte-code saved to .elc files, and that byte-code loads and runs faster than uncompiled Elisp. That’s all users really need to know…

1090

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.

1099

Data Wrangling at Slack

For a company like Slack that strives to be as data-driven as possible, understanding how our users use our product is essential. The Data Engineering team at Slack works to provide an ecosystem to help people in the company quickly and easily answer questions about usage, so they can make better and data informed…

1108

KDevelop 5.0.0 release

Almost two years after the release of KDevelop 4.7, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 5.0. KDevelop is an integrated development environment focusing on support of the C++, Python, PHP and JavaScript/QML programming languages. Many important changes and refactorings were done for version…