Best of 2018

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

Software Engineering
1234

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…

1235

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…

1247

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…