Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 283 posts.

Tools & Productivity
242

Unquantified

The only real valuable thing is intuition. – Albert Einstein A year ago I got rid of my scale, a simple act that turned out to be the catalyst for a year’s worth of quiet introspection and experimentation in removing quantification from my life. A year later I’m quantifiably more ignorant about myself than I have been…

251

Making Slides

I was asked to give a short talk in my Departmental Proseminar yesterday on the topic of giving presentations, and specifically about making slides effective. There is more than one way to give a good talk, and there is more than one way to make “good slides” or—better—make good use of slides and other material you…

260

Make your own build system

On this page I present a robust, custom build system for a software project written in C, in less than 500 lines of Python code. I think it is about as minimal as a practical dependency-tracking build system can get. Although it adds to the code that must be maintained as part of the project, I think that having a…

264

Versioned Go Commands

What does it mean to add versioning to the go command? The overview post gave a preview, but the followup posts focused mainly on underlying details: the import compatibility rule , minimal version selection , and defining go modules . With those better understood, this post examines the details of how versioning…