Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 894 posts.

Software Engineering
706

Programmers Should Automate More

Last week, I created a small script to aid my workflow which left me wondering why I didn't make it earlier. It adds an option in [Finder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finder_\(software\))'s context menu to start a static web server in any folder which makes it easier to preview static websites. Technically, it's…

707

Casually removing root files

You’re walking at $HOME, minding your own business. $ whoami > user $ pwd > /home/user But something is bothering your feet. It’s like if a little rock has fallen into your shoe. You take it off, to see what’s going on. $ ls -lah ./left-shoe ---------- 1 root root 4 May 30 13:20 little-rock That’s odd. It’s there, but…

712

Go and Simplicity Debt Redux

In my previous post I discussed my concerns the additional complexity adding generics or immutability would bring to a future Go 2.0. As it was an opinion piece, I tried to keep it around 500 words. This post is an exploration of the most important (and possibly overlooked) point of that post.

718

Render Multimedia in Pure C

In a previous article I demonstrated video filtering with C and a unix pipeline . Thanks to the ubiquitous support for the ridiculously simple Netpbm formats — specifically the “Portable PixMap” ( .ppm , P6 ) binary format — it’s trivial to parse and produce image data in any language without image libraries. Video…