Best of 2017

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

Software Engineering
212

Minimal PDF

Most PDF files do not look readable in a text editor. Compression, encryption, and embedded images are largely to blame. After removing these three components, one can more easily see that PDF is a human-readable document description language.

220

Modern Front-end in Rails

An opinionated guide to modern, modular, component-based approach to handling your presentation logic in Rails that does not depend on any frontend framework. Follow our three-part tutorial to learn the bare minimum of up-to-date frontend techniques by example and finally make sense of it all. Part 1: goodbye Asset…

233

How I Write Tests

The longer I spend as a software engineer, the more obsessive I get about testing. I fully subscribe to the definition of legacy code as “code without an automated test suite.” I’m convinced that the best thing you can do to encourage fast progress in a test suite is to design for testing and have a fast, reliable…

239

Working with time in Postgres

A massive amount of reporting queries, whether really intensive data analysis, or just basic insights into your business involving looking at data over a certain time period. Postgres has really rich support for dealing with time out of the box, something that’s often very underweighted when dealing with a database…