Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 808 posts.

Software Engineering
783

On null

I've had an interesting conversation on the topic of null over the last few days, spurred by the logical disaster of null. I disagreed with the statement in the post that: Logically-speaking, there is no such thing as Null This is true in some logics, but not in all logics. Boolean logic as described in...

786

Text Matching Using Cosine Similarity

Recently I was working on a project where I have to cluster all the words which have a similar name. For a novice it looks a pretty simple job of using some Fuzzy string matching tools and get this done. However in reality this was a challenge because of multiple reasons starting from pre-processing of the data to…

787

Incrementally Improving the DOM

Last time , I tried to convince you that you might not need the virtual DOM, and that many common UI patterns can be reproduced with a completely static page, with changes only happening at the leaves of the tree - attributes and text nodes. For some trickier UI patterns, I added back a limited form of dynamic…

795

Portability of tar features

The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given the POSIX standarization in late 80s and the popularity of GNU tar, you would expect the interoperability problems to…

804

Differential Synchronization (2009)

Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.