Best of 2017

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

Software Engineering
1115

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…

1117

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…

1119

“Holy Grail” Bugs in Emulation, Part 2

It’s been two months since first writing on Holy Grail bugs in emulation and while it did pique the interest of many emulator developers there has been little movement on solving the bugs. Lior did much more research on solving Pinball Fantasies and byuu dug up a forum post implying that there is in fact a three…

1124

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.

1125

More on GVFS

After watching a couple of days of GVFS conversation, I want to add a few things. What problems are we solving? GVFS (and the related Git optimizations) really solves 4 distinct problems: A large number of files – Git doesn’t naturally work well with hundreds of thousands or millions of files in your working set…

1140

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…