Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 1,420 posts.

Software Engineering
65

Why Use Postgres?

Five years ago I wrote a post that got some good attention on why you should use Postgres. Almost a year later I added a bunch of things I missed. Many of those items bear repeating, and I’ll recap a few of those in the latter half of this post. But in the last 4-5 years there’s been a lot of improvements and more…

79

A Case of Stolen Source Code

Last week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app HandBrake was compromised . One of the two download servers for HandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the app, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote control of your computer.

83

Curl is C

For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →

84

Git git git git git

Ever found you’ve accidentally entered too many gits in your terminal and wondered if there’s a solution to it? I quite often type git then go away and come back, then type a full git status after it. This leads to a lovely (annoying) error out the box: $ git git status git: 'git' is not a git command. See 'git…