Best of 2018

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

Software Engineering
91

The Game Engine Black Book: Doom

The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM is now available for purchase. It is being released exactly 25 years after DOOM.zip was first published on the University of Wisconsin FTP server in December 1993. You can get it at the following locations: - Amazon ( USA , France , UK , and many more). - Google Books ( here with no…

96

A Spectre is Haunting Unicode

In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no…

99

Nobody's just reading your code

Most programmers agree that we don't read enough code. The interviews in Peter Seibel's book, “Coders at work” highlight a comical contradiction: almost all the programmers interviewed by Seibel recommend that others read code for fun, but none of them routinely do so themselves. Seibel even asked Hal Abelson (of SICP…

114

Go += Package Versioning

More precisely, we need to add the concept of package versions to the working vocabulary of both Go developers and our tools, so that they can all be precise when talking to each other about exactly which program should be built, run, or analyzed. The go command needs to be able to tell developers exactly which…