Best of 2017

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

Software Engineering
94

JSON Feed

We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs. So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects…

102

How a 64k intro is made

The demoscene is about producing cool real time works (as in “runs on your computer”) called demos . Some demos are really small, say 64 kilobytes or less, and these are called intros . The name comes from “crack intros”. So an intro is just a demo that’s small.

108

Tmux and Vim – better together

There are numerous benefits of using tmux. The benefits I discussed there are independent of one’s choice of text editor. But if you’re a vim user, the benefits of tmux reach even further. One of the best aspects of tmux is that it unlocks the potential for a more powerful vim-based development environment, allowing…

115

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 *…