Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 4,763 posts.

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511

What is Nix and why you should try it

Normally our Unix systems organise the file system in a structure called the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Installing into an FHS has limitations, what would happen if we want to install, for example, two different versions of ruby at the same time? Typically this isn't possible without explicitly specifying a…

528

Floating Point Visually Explained

While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…