Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 1,274 posts.

Software Engineering
1026

Go on Very Small Hardware

How low we can Go and still do something useful? I recently bought this ridiculously cheap board: I bought it for three reasons. First, I have never dealt (as a programmer) with STM32F0 series. Second, the STM32F10x series is getting old. MCUs belonging to the STM32F0 family are just as cheap if not cheaper and has…

1029

Go and Versioning: Minimal Version Selection

A versioned Go command must decide which module versions to use in each build. I call this list of modules and versions for use in a given build the build list . For stable development, today’s build list must also be tomorrow’s build list. But then developers must also be allowed to change the build list: to upgrade…

1030

Xamarin Forms: it works

In July 2017, I received a call from a former colleague asking me wether I wanted to begin a new app journey with him. The client would be Paris Turf, an editor specialized in horse races results. My lovely lovely lovely horse [1] They wanted to diversify and launch a

1035

Programming Bottom-Up (1993)

(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…

1047

Java’s Mysterious Interrupt

One of the lesser known parts of Java is InterruptedException. With its vague-sounding name and non-committal Javadoc, few people are able to figure out what they need to do with it. Since I myself didn’t really grok it, I decided to put together a post explaining how interruption works. If you are looking for a more…